Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Thibaut Verron]

Le ven. 16 oct. 2020 à 08:03, Marcel Ventosa <mve1@runbox.com> a écrit :
>
> On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 23:59:07 -0400
> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> > I hope that only a minority of Emacs users know about MELPA, and I'd
> > rather not inform the rest about it.  But if something is going to
> > inform them anyway, it is better to do it with a denunciation.
>
>
> I've been using Emacs (and MELPA) for the best part of a decade and
> knew nothing about this! I'm concerned to use only free software and
> actively avoid proprietary software, so this is a bit of a shock.

As I understand it, Melpa packages cannot *be* or *install* non-free
software. But some will not work without such software, which can in
theory encourage users to install it.

So unless you yourself installed non-free software, Melpa cannot have
made your Emacs configuration non-free by accident.

> In fact, I would go the extra mile and say Emacs should expressly warn
> users over the dangers of installing proprietary software from
> unofficial repositories (by the way, I always just assumed MELPA was
> somehow official and related to ELPA, because its name is so similar to
> ELPA). This survey could provide a good opportunity for such
> information/education.

ELPA means Emacs Lisp Package Archive, so both Melpa and GNU Elpa are ELPA's.
I think that commonly referring to GNU Elpa as simply Elpa (which I am
also guilty of) is a bigger source of confusion than Melpa and GNU
Elpa sharing the same suffix.

GNU Elpa and the future Non-GNU Elpa are (will be) activated by
default as package archives, Melpa is not.
The hope is that once 99% of the packages by the community are
available in an archive activated by default, users will not rush to
install Melpa in the same proportions as today.