As I recall, in the old days you (RMS) used to do user polls on occasion.
Would you consider doing it in this case? That is, is it appropriate
for the GNU project to place naked aborts in its programs?
Conducting a poll does not mean asking users to vote on a design
decison or a design policy. We conduct polls to find out what users
like or dislike, and why. Then, based on the information, we look for
ways to satisfy the users better.
It could make sense to poll the users over whether using fancy_abort
in some program (such as Emacs) would be helpful for them.
But what are you saying to those users who don't like it that GNU programs
abort silently when they discover bugs in themselves? Aren't you saying
"tough" in a somewhat more polite way?
No, because nobody has complained about it. The idea that Emacs
should not use plain abort to crash has only been raised here, not by
Emacs users. The real complaint that I really got was about
cross-jumping.
