RE: Emacs Windows barebin distribution

[Drew Adams]

> > And in this case a very good measure was proposed.  And, 
> > unbelievably, it was summarily dismissed/countered in
> > favor of reliance on the much poorer measure of
> > emacs-devel activity.  That is the argument and the 
> > attitude I spoke out against.
> 
> Polling users doesn't happen on its own. Someone has to spend the time
> to do it.

The proposal from Matthias was not a proposal to poll the users.  He suggested
examining the download logs to see how much the barebins were picked up.

I do not know how much energy is required to do that, which is why my support
for it was qualified by "if easy", "if feasible" etc.

> Removing something deemed unnecessary and waiting for anyone
> to complain is less work. That wouldn't be a good rationale for
> killing a heavily used, or a core, feature, but it seems perfectly
> reasonable to me when speaking of something that's likely not used by
> anybody (more so after Eli's comment about it being broken).

I don't disagree with that at all.  I agree that it is a reasonable approach.

My argument was against the reasoning that _because_ no one has spoken up here
there must not be any user interest in this.  That's a false argument and
suggests a bad attitude, IMHO.

> So the argument and the attitude is, I think, "why should we spend
> time in something that we're convinced it is useless anyway, unless we
> have a good reason to think otherwise?"

See above.  That is a fair argument.  But that is not the argument and attitude
I was speaking about.