*scratch*

9:16 PM

First!

Feeds

Gilles has made a change to the feeds posted into this room

Meta questions will be posted in this chatroom

We can add main site questions as well, but it can be overwhelming

Feeds

Gilles has made a change to the feeds posted into this room

Nice.

Q: Welcome to your Emacs site!

9

You might remember my post last week which confused and troubled a lot of you. I wasn't clear enough then, so I hope you'll let me try again: We love Emacs and we love empowering people to build Q&A sites. This community is all about getting answers to long tail Emacs questions. If you have an ...

2

Q: How should we typeset cursors and marks in examples?

How can we format cursors and marks in examples? I recently answered How to add a prefix to every line?, which illustrated rectangular sections. To make it clearer, I needed to show where the mark and cursor are when you run a command. I just did it using * for the mark and ▮ for the cursor. I'm...

9:33 PM

@KingShimkus Hello. I'm glad to see you here.

@JonEricson, I would not miss it for the world.

Just so we are all on the same page, it doesn't hurt to ask typical questions, but they don't count for much at this stage. What we really are looking for are questions that make this a unique resource: questions not answered anywhere else.

Okay, so more specific questions? I have no problem doing that.

Sort of. "Long tail" is how we usually phrase it:

joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/04/19.html

> There are only 200 easy law questions, and they've all been asked 100 times on Mahalo and Yahoo!Answers. But there are 20,000,000 detailed, difficult, long-tail questions that only professionals can answer, and we'd be doing a REAL service to the Internet by creating a place where you can find answers to the 20,000,000 hard questions, not the 200 easy ones.

So, should I check here whether a question is suitable before asking it? Since tone is, apparently, crucial.

I expected more people here.

9:38 PM

And the trick is we are also interested in questions that wouldn't fly on SO. (That's got me a bit worried.)

Any idea how long the site has been up.

@JonEricson I'll do my best. :-)

@FaheemMitha It takes a while for the emails to arrive and people to read them. Plus timezones...

@JonEricson, okay, WiIl do.

I think it is a wacky criterion myself, but I'll try to humor them.

@JonEricson Yes, I haven't actually got my email yet. But @Gilles posted in link in the U&L chatroom, so I realised the site was open.

and I managed to get in.

It helps to already have an account, of course.

I see Gilles is already here. Either he got his email early, or he used his superpowers.

@FaheemMitha, I found it on the area51.stackexchange.com site.

9:42 PM

@KingShimkus Ah, right.

Yep.

A: Does it pay to spin off sites?

@FaheemMitha It could be worse. You could be a vi user:

5

"Design Lessons from the Fastest Q&A Site in the West", a 2011 study of Stack Overflow, suggested several measures of Q&A success: Number of active users, Percent of questions answered, Speed of answers, and Question views. Here is the current Stack Overflow baseline for some of these measur...

The site has been open 5 minutes, and gilles is at 361. :-)

I think this is further evidence that gilles is actually an army of bots.

Maybe.

@KingShimkus Er, what?

I think you got the wrong person.

9:49 PM

@JonEricson, how do you want us to add tags?

@KingShimkus You know you can edit comments, right?

@FaheemMitha, I did. Sorry.

Yeah, I know.

Q: About packages (in particular AucTeX or ESS)

0

Are all questions about Emacs packages suitable for this page? What about packages as, for example, AucTeX or ESS? On TeX - StackExchange we already see several questions related to AucTeX. Are such questions acceptable here? I am not talking about how to install the package (that's maybe a to...

@FaheemMitha it's been over three hours!

@Gilles Oh, really? Now I'm feeling left out...

9:56 PM

@KingShimkus When you think a set of questions needs a tag, add it. ;-)

@JonEricson, ok. :-)

@JonEricson Excellent. Tagging away here.

so, common-lisp is ok?

@JonEricson emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/33/… should be tagged backups, not backup

@Gilles Sensible.

10:10 PM

@JonEricson What's a regex? Emacs only has regexps.

and the tag name shouldn't be abbreviated anyway.

Q: Emacs questions from StackOverflow or SuperUser

10:22 PM

1

What is the policy for questions that are already asked on StackOverflow, SuperUser, or something similar? I've got a few questions over there that are unanswered (and some answered but I'm not fully satisfied with the answers) that would would love to move over here to get more attention. Is the...

asmeurer

I have some hard questions from stackoverflow. Are they a good thing to ask during the private beta?

"hard" like it's likely no one will have an answer

namely stackoverflow.com/questions/15895313/… stackoverflow.com/questions/8901974/… and stackoverflow.com/questions/11532149/…

no question is too hard (unless maybe if you think that it's impossible for anyone to answer)

asmeurer

those first two are probably not impossible but they probably require a decent amount of elisp, if not a whole new library to do

@Gilles You can take the programmer out of Perl, but you can't take the Perl out of the programmer. (Just be glad I didn't use re. ;-)

asmeurer

I just doubt they will get answers during the private beta, since there are so few users

10:34 PM

@asmeurer do we have Emacs experts in the committers list? I didn't check

@Gilles A few, yes.

Some emacs package maintainers were in there.

Is bringing questions from other sites here Ok? If they haven't been satisfactorily answered there?

@FaheemMitha, If they haven't been answered there, why are we bringing them here? Do you know the answer? I'm not criticizing you or anything. I am just wondering...

@KingShimkus No, I don't know the answer, otherwise I would have answered it. And I suggest bringing them here, because they haven't been answered there. And they wouldn't do any worse there.

@KingShimkus Part of the justification for this site is to be a place for experts who can't handle the existing sites (because too much crap, too much spread, whatever). So a test for this site is if we can produce better answers than the established sites.

I see. Thank you for your input.

Q: Guidelines for external packages in answers

10:45 PM

1

With the advent of package.el and external package repos such as MELPA, Emacs has an increasingly vague notion of what's "built-in". What should the guidelines be regarding answers that reference external packages? Should a "good" answer be restricted to "core" Emacs and/or GNU ELPA, or should pa...