Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Philip K.]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > >>> - mysql instead of sqlite, which also implies a mysql instance running
>   > >>
>   > >> SQLite is actually surprisingly resilient, according to [0]:
>
> It would be a mistake to put the input into any sort of database
> program.  That would only make things difficult and increase the
> special knowledge people would need in order to work on this.
>
> Here's the simple and clean way to do it.
>
> Each time a user responds, convert all the answers into a formulaic
> piece text which states the questions and answers.  Email that to a
> certain address, which will accumulate these messages in one inbox
> file.
>
> Then it will be simple to do all sorts of counting or analysis on that
> file.

The issue I see here is that if you expert plain-text responses, someone
might just submit something that breaks the format, or even submit an
email written in HTML. So the data couldn't just be stored in plain
text, but would have to at least have some decoding to correctly parse
the message, and some encoding the safely store the message. You
wouldn't want someone who could submit 1000 fake or troll responses,
just because they know what what's going on behind the scenes.

> Database programs are useful when there are hundreds of thousands of
> records and you need to search for any one of them.  Or when the data
> are being altered.  We will not have so many answers, and each one
> will never change once sent.

Databases are useful whenever you've got data to work with. SQLite is
useful at whatever sale one is working at, from browsers to cars. And
besides, it's safer to use than directly writing to the file system (see
https://danluu.com/file-consistency/ for more details). And generally
speaking, file systems are also just databases, just that they are
directory-oriented, not record-oriented and usually have better support
in regards to OS primitives.

All in all, I don't this that this should be an issue, SQLite is well
documented, and can easily be extracted into whatever format someone
might need or want, just easier than with a mailbox or other classical
unix-like approaches.

-- 
        Philip K.