Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Jean Louis]

* Thibaut Verron <thibaut.verron@gmail.com> [2020-10-12 11:38]:
> So only free form, no multiple choice, and permanently in Emacs?
> That's fine for me.
> 
> The goal is then sensibly different from that of the suggested survey,
> and as you say, they are not mutually exclusive.

Yes, like that.

Emacs has its website, various simple qeustion based opinion polls can
easily published on the website, that was done since inception of
websites.

> > My opinion is maybe in that sense more "pushy" then what RMS wants, I
> > think that free software philosophy has to be pushy 10 times more than
> > it is now, as the increase of proprietary software and troublesame
> > abuses of people on this planet increased as well.
> >
> > > Okay, that is a valid point (although I would be interested to
> > > know if people still use Marmalade). But then we might as well drop
> > > the repository question altogether.
> >
> > I would drop all the questions, and just have it embedded in Emacs
> > Help menu for people to complain, suggest improvements, etc. System
> > already exists, but "Report Emacs bug" does not incite suggesting
> > improvements.
> 
> Questions are useful to avoid writer paralysis though.
> There could be three systems: "answer survey" (with a few free-form
> questions to give inspiration), "send suggestion", "report bug".

That is right, that is how users should be motivated to communicate.

> > Of course. I would not trust the Microsoft Github data at all, and it
> > does not show logically to be true, here is short analysis:
> >
> > - we assume here that Spacemacs has 20700 stars/likes on Microsoft
> >   Github, because it says so on the page. Does that mean those are
> >   "users" of Spacemacs? Hard to believe, see below why.
> >
> > - if I open the main Spacemacs Github page, I can see that last
> >   improvement on Spacemacs was 29th February 2020, there is not much
> >   going on. But Spacemacs is appearing as first on Github for the
> >   search word "emacs".
> 
> Second is the emacs-mirror (and the first result for a google search
> "github emacs" for me).

Emacs mirror on Github is second, but obviously there is no movement
there, it shows that statistics are doubtful.

> I don't know how github sorts its results, it is not just stars.

Because nobody knows, and especially because it is from Microsoft, I
would not touch it or believe it. But that is up to imaginary, as for
now, survey evaluators.

> > It is untrue that 20700 stars mean there are so many users, people
> > click how they want and wish. Spacemacs is definitely not for
> > beginners, it is distributed from Git, so user must have and know how
> > to git pull or clone it.
> 
> Are you sure about that? The website spacemacs.org has a big
> "download" button which serves a zipped copy of master.
> Does running spacemacs require knowledge from git after that point?

No info on that. But it is quite easy to ask Spacemacs for website
statistics, as survey for that reason is obviously not necessary. Then
how to know if statistics are real?

By asking various configuration packages for statistics, one can find
out some ratios, but why? One has to ask WHY each time. One WHY could
be to replicate or include or invite the configuration to GNU
project. If that is reason why, then why not ask. If there is nothing
special, it is just good to let people do what they wish.

Example of discussed Spacemacs is clear to me, the data is already
there, so the result of pathetic evaluation is that there are many Vim
users who like now to use Emacs because of Spacemacs, there are many
new keybindings, so if anybody wish to improve Emacs, one could see
which are major features of Spacemacs and could ask developers to
include their settings into main stream Emacs. Why not? Just go
ahead and ask.

GNU project already invited everybody to contribute with their
projects to be included in GNU.

You may ask RMS and Spacemacs developers, if they wish to include
Spacemacs as official part of GNU Emacs, that way GNU Emacs would
possibly gain popularity.

Spacemacs configuration could be optional for user to set, similar
like a theme. Why not. I know there are ways.

> Regardless, it is possible to run spacemacs without ever visiting the
> github page of the project, and github stars cannot track those.
> So even though some of those 20k stars are probably not users, or are
> no longer users, I still believe that the actual number of users may
> be way more than 20k.

Yes, but how do you know that? Like where is information available?

Finally, why is it important? It is clear that some people like Vim
configuration in Emacs, yet it does not mean to change whole
configuration to be like theirs.