We're an Emacs Q&A site, but there's a grey area (to me, at least) about questions on external programs that are closely related to our use of Emacs, but which are not actually Emacs. In effect, I'm referring to "helper" programs that we use only to make our experience with Emacs better.
The immediate examples that spring to mind are programs used to
make interacting with email more productive. Let's say the
ultimate goal is a working gnus setup: everything about the question is in
pursuit of that. There are lots of blog posts about setting up gnus
with offlineimap, mbsync, and dovecot, but many of those
posts would be semi-unreadable to a user with minimal experience
editing configuration files (or even with a fair amount -- I never
figured out dovecot).
Would questions on setting up these helper programs be on-topic here? It's iffy -- hence the question. Do we:
- Take helper-program questions here as long as they're clearly questions about getting an Emacs ecosystem set up, or
- Send people over to stackoverflow?
Related threads:
- This meta post from a while back argues that configuring non-Emacs programs should be off-topic.
- Another thread (Questions where Emacs is only incidental) from the early days of the site suggested that they're borderline questions, with some folks leaning off-topic and some leaning in favor of inclusiveness on questions.
gnuswithofflineimapanddovecotas suggested on site X. I'm most of the way there but am stuck on thedovecotpart. How do I getdovecotworking?" Strictly speaking, such a question would be aboutdovecotand not Emacs, but since the spirit of the question is "how to set up the Emacs tool chain to do x," it's not clear if we do (should?) take such questions here.stumpwm. I think questions about gettingstumpwmto talk to emacs would likely be valid. (The intersection ofstumpwmusers and emacs users approaches the set ofstumpwmusers, right?)