Re: Representation of the Emacs userbase on emacs-devel

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 02.09.2021 23:35, Philip Kaludercic wrote:
> But don't they represent other users?

Of course they do. But what proportion of users? By the virtue of simply 
being on this mailing list, we are already skewed toward an older, more 
conservative crowd. And then we make it a veto power if *some* 5 people 
from said crowd disapprove.

> 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'm not saying it's easy, but we don't even try. We don't try to make 
whole-userbase polls (we talked about it a few times over last years, 
and never went through), we don't make decisions based on polls made by 
other people (only one exception that comes to mind is Lars' initiative 
regarding ring-bell-function), and we never make decisions based on what 
"others" do. Even when it is clear that when all other editors have made 
a certain technical decision in a different way than we did, decades 
ago, we stick with it. And I'm not even talking about major disruptive 
changes like a switch to CUA would be.

> 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?

Every recent discussion about a UI change has been like that. A 
suggestion is made, arguments added, some people disagree saying it 
won't jive with their workflow (never mind that Emacs is, in fact, 
customizable), and that's it. For example, the thread about bindings for 
undo-only+undo-redo, which would make Emacs friendlier to any user with 
experience in about any other text editing program out there.

Or take indent-tabs-mode, an old pet peeve of mine: 
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20322 I can talk about 
contemporary practice, whole-industry polls, threads with personal 
opinions anywhere, threads with people expressing confusion about the 
current default behavior... but a few people say a change will be 
inconvenient -- and it moves nowhere.