Re: Idea for determining what users use

[Vincent LADEUIL]

>>>>> "rms" == Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

    vila> What about people who use emacs for other things than
    vila> mail ?

    rms> I don't see why that would be a problem.

Because they may not have configured emacs to send mail.

    vila> Or those more generally who cannot send mail from emacs
    vila> (for whatever reason).

    rms> I guess there is nothing we can do about that.

My proposal  was to help them cut&paste  the relevant information
into *their* favorite email tool.

    vila> What about collecting all these infos and prepare a
    vila> buffer containing the mail to be sent (that could be an
    vila> alternate mean to report usages).

    rms> It doesn't seem like a useful idea.  These messages will
    rms> probably be rare.

Ok, my  experience regarding  emacs users is  that only a  few of
them use it for mail. I can very well be wrong on that point.

But as the subject of  the thread is "determining what users use"
it could  be interesting to  instrument more functions  than just
the obsoleted  ones (mail, sub-processes, major  and minor modes,
etc.).


    vila> Isn't it possible to only instrument 'eval' to get all
    vila> functions (or interesting ones) used ?

    rms> It is possible, but I think an implementation that
    rms> avoids intrusion into the guts of Emacs is a superior
    rms> one.

So  what   about  instrumenting  "autoload"  ?   Or  defining  an
autoload-obsolete function ?

        Vincent