Graham Percival wrote Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:19 AM
In the past few months, we've had a number of developers being surprised at some of the build system changes. The changes (not just the input/ deletions) *were* announced in advance, but it's easy to miss emails on a large list like -devel. When a proposal goes out and nobody answers, it's difficult to know if people aren't replying because they thought it was obviously ok, or because they didn't see the message. This is troubling. In the past few weeks, I've noticed that I spend about an hour a day reading the lilypond lists and writing "organizational" emails. That's fine for me, since I want to keep an overall view of everything (although I tend to skim+delete any programming talk). But this isn't ideal for somebody wanting to do 5-10 hours a week... just keeping up to date could take all their available lilypond-voluteer time. This is troubling. I'm therefore thinking about writing a weekly developer newsletter. It would have a summary of large discussions, a section for important proposals, and a week later, a section for the results of those proposals (i.e. either "being implemented" or "was rejected for reasons XYZ"). I expect this to take up to 5 hours to set up, followed by up to 1 hour a week for each issue. Once it's going, it would be relatively easy to pass the job to somebody else if there was a volunteer. Do you think it's worth it?
I don't think so. Most of the 'lesser' developers don't push their more significant changes unless they see a positive response from a core developer, so this issue really affects only one or two people who push changes even though there has been a zero response. The second point you make is more interesting, as this is a serious problem for those who have little time, but electing to receive a digest from the list is a readily available though admittedly partial solution. I myself prefer to read all the developer mails anyway. I don't regard it as a waste of time - I've learnt a lot from them. Also I think your time is far better spent doing the things only you can do - this is the most valuable contribution you can make. Trevor _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
