Representation of the Emacs userbase on emacs-devel

[Philip Kaludercic]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> Under the current system a sufficiently loud single user can
> effectively veto any change. Or at least 3-4 such users.
>
> But even 5 or 10 users are in no way representative of our entire user base.

But don't they represent other users? The fundamental issue underlying
all of this is that different people have different ideas of who is
using Emacs. We cannot say if emacs-devel is representative of the
entire user base or not. One can certainly sense differences when
comparing it to different communities (HN, /r/emacs, /emg/, popular
bloggers, various developer groups, ...), but these all tend to skew
towards Emacs enthusiasts, so they cannot be seen as reliable metric
either.

I agree that the ability for a handful of users to veto changes can be
annoying, but how harmful it is should be decided on a case-to-case
basis. Do you (or anyone else) have any examples of where one or just a
few people prevented a change from being made that you think would have
been good in your eyes?

-- 
        Philip Kaludercic