Re: Suggested experimental test

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   That doesn't answer the main question: how do you concretely poll these 
   users? and what would you consider to be a significant enough fraction of 
   Emacs users for the poll to be representative?  Would 500 answers be 
   enough? 1000? 5000? 10000?

I don't have the link at hand, but RMS had posted how to do exactly
this time of poll.  I can try to locate it for you if you want.

   What would you do with the result of such a poll?  What if only 50 or 100 
   in those 10000 answer "yes"?  Should the feature be kept for those 50 or 
   100?

The idea behind a poll is to gather some data and get an idea of the
overal situation.  emacs-devel isn't a very good place for such
information.

   Moreover the result of a yes/no poll like "Do you use M-o 
   (frobnicate-line)?" is not very useful:

What is the issue understanding those answers? They give some insight
as to what users might prefer and what they do.

   > so one could accumulate a set of proposal in release 20, send it out 
   > during release 21, and delibrate and implement for 22.

   That would be unrealistic, it would mean a four to six years waiting 
   period before an UI change can be implemented, long enough to discourage 
   anyone in advance to even envision the possibility of proposing such a 
   change.

Would that be a bad thing? Why is there such a hurry to change
_existing_ behaviour, or specifically _removing_ existing behaviour?
We aren't talking about every single UI change.  Emacs is stable, and
significant changes in the UI should take time (I consider C-o to be
more significant than M-o -- which at least when it got modified the
key got a different useful meaning).

   >> Fortunately, such changes are easy to revert for users who would
   >> dislike them, and the way to revert them is documented in the
   >> NEWS file.
   >
   > From my experience, it isn't the case.

   Of course it is, for example the way to revert the M-o change is
   documented in the NEWS file, both for those who would like to only
   revert facemenu, and for those who would like to only revert the
   two center-foo commands.

We are misscommunicating, I am talking about restoring the previous
behaviour in Emacs, not on a per user basis.  

The point here is that the suggestions have been removing
featues, without replacing them. exit-recursive-edit got moved to a
different binding, and the semantics of C-c got changed to something
useful.