Subject: RE: bug#9074: 24.0.50; problems trying to mail bug report, again

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 07:25:03 -0700

> So effectively I feel there are two bug reports here:
> 
> 1) Change order of questioning for one-time SMTP configuration to
> avoid pointless questions for people who don't want to send mail
> in Emacs.
> 
> 2) Add a method of saving a user customisation that is picked up
> when running emacs -Q.
> 
> The former seems like a sensible thing to do.  I (FWIW) think the
> latter is a terrible idea.

I did *not* propose your #2.  I would not propose it.

My preference would be to return to the bug-reporting behavior users had before
- much less confusing and invasive.

Emacs is for everyone, not just programmers and not just people familiar with
SMTP or even with configuring a mail client for SMTP.  When a user tries to
submit a bug report, starting out by asking about SMTP configuration is not good
UI for a program such as Emacs that is aimed at everyone.

A user who has email already set up - which is probably 99.999% of computer and
cell-phone users - should be able to send an Emacs bug report without any
interaction with Emacs wrt mail setup.

Just one opinion.  We are complicating things unnecessarily - Occam's razor.

Aside from sending a bug report, which should be for all users, including
non-techie Emacs newbies, I don't care so much how complicated things get (I
care, but not as much).

But we should be making bug reporting simpler, not more scary, confusing, and
difficult to use.