LyX users influence development by posting tickets on trac. A few brave users participate in discussions on lyx-devel. I think there is a clear way for LyX users who would like to get in touch with LyX developers. I think the other way is less obvious.
I often find myself thinking "I wonder what most users think about this". I could send an email to the lyx-users list, but most of the time I don't because i would only expect a couple to respond and that wouldn't really give me an idea of what most users think. I propose the following: an annual survey of LyX users. What I am most interested in asking users is "do they prefer X or Y?". For example, I proposed a recent patch that really comes down to a preference. A couple of developers confirmed this, and I just planned on forgetting about it. But then I realized that just because a patch includes a personal preference doesn't necessarily mean it should be rejected. Developers could vote on it, but it would also be nice to get input from users. This could be qualitative, such as "here are a list of enhancements that are being debated for inclusion in LyX 2.2. What are your thoughts?" or we could make it quantitative "if you have sent more than N emails to lyx-users or lyx-devel in the past year, you can vote". And perhaps 2/3 majority would be required for an enhancement to go through. A couple of examples where I would be interested in knowing the answer are (A1) continuous spell-check by default. (A2) behavior of LFUN_DOWN_SELECT on last line. The survey could include other types of questions, but it would be nice to keep the survey as brief as possible. Another question that would be useful (e.g. for deciding what the minimum version of packages our layouts and templates should support) is: (B1) what TeX distribution do you use (please provide the year, e.g. TeX Live 2009) and how often do you update to the newest packages? Any thoughts? Scott
