Re: Upcoming merge of adaptive-wrap

[Po Lu]

Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:

> But would they, largely? You actually have to visit the directory
> which hosts NEWS on your system (where is it installed to?), mark all
> previous NEWS files and do the search. That's non-trivial.

Is this meant to imply that selecting "Help -> Emacs News", then typing
`C-x d' is non-trivial?  What about reading the manual, or any other of
Emacs's built-in facilities for assisting users?

When users are stumped, their first reactions are to reach for the
documentation, be that the manual, apropos or NEWS.  Perhaps there is a
breed of users for whom the package list is the first resort, but for
the reasons previously mentioned, the package list is unlikely to help
them.

The negligible portion of these users who give up after being frustrated
by the package list (if they exist at all) will never find the objects
of their searches, and won't be affected by decisions to place packages
in core or on ELPA.

It also stands to reason that users outside the first two categories are
more inclined to take to a search engine, and to them this thread will
be more enlightening than the package menu ever will.

> If you sit every user behind a screen and force them to read either of
> the texts entirely, sure. But that's not how it usually works.

[...]

> It's a good explanation (easier to understand than the summary, I
> agree), but I'm curious what would you improve in the summary to make
> it more recognizable. Any particular keywords? From where I'm
> standing, even after reading the description, all the important ones
> seem to be there: "wrap", "adaptive", "line-wrapping", "wrap-prefix".

I never proposed to improve the summary, since in my opinion, the
current package description is already the optimum under the limitations
of its format.

> Even if you're reading the NEWS, you probably don't carefully scan
> every entry, so there must be some particular words which might have
> piqued your interest in the way that the current summary does not.

The mental effort required to understand the NEWS and the documentation
I installed is so little that, truly, the only words left to be said are
"there are none so blind as those who will not see", assuming that the
reader is searching for this feature.

> The one-liner description indeed needs to be recognizable enough.

I cannot imagine how that might be accomplished.

Thanks.