Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 19.10.2020 06:48, Richard Stallman 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. ]]]
>
>    > This is a weaker suggestion: Maybe packages could have a tag to signal
>    > that they are related to proprietary software, that could be then
>    > displayed both via list-packages and describe-package?
>
> This approach depends on any number of people that we don't know
> to include a special marker whenever they release packages that lead
> the user to nonfree software.  Since these people eapparently
> don't agree with our basic ideas about such packages, I don't think
> we could count on them to do that.

MELPA to a large part consists of a database of "recipes", one for each 
package that it builds and distributes. This tag can be put inside 
recipes, and thus be controlled by MELPA maintainers, and not by the 
packages authors themselves.

If we provide some well-defined criteria for such tags, and pick a 
neutral-enough name, I don't see why the MELPA maintainers (who are 
quite reasonable people IME) wouldn't go for it.

Question is, would you agree to add MELPA to the default list of package 
archives if they do?

We'll also have to discuss how the user interface would look when 
dealing with those tags.