On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 05:15:33PM +0200, Mats Bengtsson wrote: > For example, Graham has worked day and night during more > than a year to bring the documentation into it's current shape and I > understand that he can feel personally insulted if someone dares > criticize his own "baby".
It depends on the criticism. If it's well-thought out and delivered politely, I respond well. If somebody says "hlp where do i put this command, ur docs sux just like all other open source docs", then I respond negatively. Also, I respond *very* negatively to people making demands, either of me, or of programmers. Actually, demanding/impolite users are the main reason I decided to leave LilyPond two years ago. > If you recognize yourself in this description, watch out so you > don't get burned out. If this is directed at me, then yes, there were a few times during GDP when I struggled with some of the changes -- in particular with Trevor's work on the LM. (not the famous dispute in Oct 2007, but later, smaller things, in 2008) Actually, that still happens -- witness the recent discussion about clarifying note syntax (pitch-dur-other). But I always reminded myself of the golden rule of open-source work: he who has the gold, makes the rules. 's/has the gold/does the work/', obviously. As long as the author is aware of the doc guidelines and the reasons behind them, I'm ok with whatever they did (within reason). I think this also came up once or twice with Carl's docs on chords and Valentin on text as well... anyway, the specifics aren't important. > I think that in some time, Graham will get a more humble attitude > towards the outcome of the GDP In one way, GDP was a failure -- I wanted to leave a team of doc writers so that they could handle whatever came up fairly easily. (un)fortunately, most doc writers have moved on to do bug work. I say "(un)fortunately", because we need programers much more than doc writers. So in the long term, this is best... also, since I re-joined the project, there isn't so much urgency to have a Graham-independent doc team. In another way, it was a mixed success and failure. We're getting fewer "where do i put this command" questions, and I don't recall many questions that touch on NR 1. OTOH, there's still tons of vocal questions -- but that was the biggest section in NR 2 that wasn't worked on. This suggests that GDP did good work at the material it covered, but we still need a GDP2 to cover the remaining stuff. :| > Myself, I have in some sense been at the other end of the scale, > spending far too much time on answering questions on the > mailing list trying to adapt the answer to the expected level > of knowledge of the person asking the question, when I probably > would have spent much of the time in a better way if I had > contributed more to the documentation to avoid getting many of > the questions. Actually, you were the inspiration for me to get involved in the docs in the first place. I wanted to reduce the amount of basic questions you got, so that you could spend time on more interesting ones (including my own questions). :) Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
