On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 06:03:23PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote: > Graham Percival <gra...@percival-music.ca> writes: > > > However, some members of lilypond-devel are actively hostile to > > novel crazy ideas. I mean, I knew that there was no way that > > people would like the /.\ prefix-postfix-neutral idea. It was an > > experiment to see whether we could have a polite discussion about > > a crazy idea. > > If you consider using the developer list as a social experimenting > ground polite in itself...
I asked if we wanted to have discussion here or elsewhere. There was consensus that it should be here. I then tried out the prefix-postfix-neutral idea. I think that was fair. > > 1. social solution: force a radical "culture shift" on -devel > > overnight so that we can have open discussions. I think that > > things have gotten better over the past few months, but it's still > > not good enough. > > In what respect is a discussion where voicing strong disapproval is > prohibited "open"? Han-Wen: "No; syntax discussions without understanding how the lilypond parser works is just blowing around hot air and discussing bike shed colors." http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2012-09/msg00109.html Such language closes off discussion. > > 3. alternate: hold these discussions on the -user list. I > > wouldn't mind that option, actually. > > And what happens when discussions in some "opinioned experts unwelcome" > forum come to a conclusion that will subsequently get the shaft in the > developer list? I honestly doubt that we will be able to counter the > "developers don't take the users serious" impression you want to avoid. The idea isn't to exclude opinionated experts; it's to exclude opinionated experts who don't spend a certain amount of willpower rewriting text to make it polite. BTW, when it comes to policy questions such as Jan's git-patch idea, I think I fall into that category. More on that later. Assuming that the opinionated expert would have some good technical argument against the idea, I think that's fine. The change from the status quo is that the idea would be discussed by positive people first (perhaps experts, perhaps not). Most idea would be dropped at this stage. I would be shocked if more than 20% of the ideas progressed to the point at which it made sense to discuss them on -devel. One of the problems with the current setup is that there's no real indication of how serious an idea is. I'm been somewhat out of touch for the past few days, so I now have about 300 emails to skim. Most of those are not serious proposals, and if they were on a lilypond-fluffy-discussion mailing list I would delete them unread. But since they're all on -devel or bug-, and since we have thread drift, I feel that I should skim them all to see if there's anything that needs replying to. A better example is Jan's idea of dropping rietveld in favor of email-only discussion of patches. My first reaction (which I'm *not* proud of) was to reply angrily to defend the status quo. I still think that rietveld is better than email-only -- but in the past few hours, I've realized that I was completely wrong to try to close off that question. The current setup *is* problematic (it's the primary complaint of developers from the anonymous survey!), so we should be open to discussing potential replacements. Even if I don't like one idea, I should have still been encouraging more discussion, rather than a slightly-muted "no you idiot, we tried it and it failed, now go away". (again, I am not at all proud of my reaction, and the irony of me replying like that after spending the past few days talking about encouraging open discussion is not lost on me) A separate mailing list for initial ideas could allow people to approach emails in a different frame of mind. Am I really busy and stressed? ok, I'll only read -devel and deal with urgent issues. Do I have some spare time and feel like discussion ideas in an unfocused, unhurried manner? ok, I'll read lilypond-fluffy-discuss. Granted, I shouldn't force a new mailing list just to accommodate my mental state. But some people seem to like the idea of having a separate place for positive discussions, so I'm not totally alone. That said, at the moment I guess I'm leaning towards having such discussions on lilypond-user, since a few people have come out strongly against having a new mailing list. - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
