Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > 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.

Yes, that's exactly the issue.  Listing a program for possible use can
lead people to use it.  If using that program requires running some
nonfree program, the listing can lead people to run that nonfree
program.

  > 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.

I agree.  I sent another message about that issue.

I think that the basic mistake was implementing support in GNU Emacs
for other package archives.  It may have seemed like the general thing
to do, at the time; but it led to a bad situation.  If I had thought
more about this, maybe I would have realized it beforehand.

  > 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.

Yes, that's the aim.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)