On Wed, 27 May 2020 at 13:07, Richard Stallman <
address@hidden> wrote:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> We might want to try and enforce a standard format for responses
> to make collation of results easier.
All else being equal, that might not be a bad thing. But it would
have the side effect of discouraging people from saying anything
which doesn't fit that form, and that is the opposite of what I
am trying to achieve.
Yes, we would need to be careful to avoid that. I probably should have said encourage rather than enforce. In my mind, I was thinking along the lines of the template displayed when you submit an emacs bug report. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of having an ELPA package which could list open 'enqiries', allow the user to review the content and then respond. The response process could add additional meta-data that could be used to route the response to the appropriate place and possibly other information which might be useful in further automation or processing. The user would then be presented with a buffer containing something like a tempo template, which they then fill out with their response. While people could delete the whole template and just enter free form text, most probably wouldn't and those that do probably felt they needed to for a reason, which could be valid.
It might take a few iterations to get right, but in the end, we could potentially have a useful feedback mechanism built into Emacs that would help gather opinions etc from a group wider than those on emacs-devel. I would certainly be willing to assist, but I don't think my elisp skills are strong enough to do the initial design and implementation. Could certainly help with testing, debugging etc.