Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Philip K.]

Thibaut Verron <thibaut.verron@gmail.com> writes:

> Le ven. 16 oct. 2020 à 05:59, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> a écrit :
>> 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 believe that it is too late for such hopes, and that a majority of
> Emacs users know about Melpa and/or uses it. Some people know about it
> without using it (most of them probably read this list) and some
> people use it without knowing it (users of pre-configured emacs'es).
>
> For instance, those three links were on the first page of a duckduckgo
> search for "install emacs packages":
>
> https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InstallingPackages
> http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_package_system.html
> http://pragmaticemacs.com/emacs/install-packages/

And that's only if the user already knows that they want to install
packages (instead of "plug-ins" or "extensions", as other software would
refer to the concept). From my experience, almost every non-official
beginners tutorial will either mention or just give you the code to
configure MELPA. And with all the starter-packages that offer to
pre-configure Emacs, you don't even think about it.

But that's currently unavoidable, a lot of the advocacy for Emacs is
based on promoting certain packages (Magit, Evil, Org-mode extensions
such as Roam, etc.) that are for the most part only available on MELPA.
Non-GNU Elpa should help to mitigate this problem, as my impression is
that most people intrigued in Emacs, would quickly loose interest, if it
weren't for these specific packages.

(In general I think that that kind promotion isn't good, at least in the
long term. Emacs is seen as getting in the way of whatever package you
need, and they therefore follow whatever method they find to avoid
learning. While possible, it leaves many on a fragile tower of
abstractions and hacks, that could break at any moment.)

-- 
        Philip K.