2008/8/18 Graham Percival <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > That seems trivial -- surely everybody knows this already -- so > let's discuss a specific example. I'll pick on Valentin since he > won't mind... and also since he's almost a complete opposite of > me.
Please do not think of me as a yes-man :-) (If anything, I'm the kind of guy who can't even say "yes" to the "no-man", if you follow me...) > He offered to do NR 1.8 Text last Jan or Feb. It's still not > finished. text.itely would be a 5-hour job for me, so I figured > 10 hours for GDP helpers. Granted, he's working on a foreign > language. If I had to write text.itely in French, it would > probably take me double the time -- *only* double, despite my very > poor French, since most of the docs are in examples anyway. Well, although I didn't think it would be so hard, let's face it: I just suck at writing documentation. (see below) > GDP is ending with a half-finished NR 1.8. It's also ending with > a half-finished NR 1.6; Text isn't the only unfinished "main > notation" section. Lots of users don't read the mailists; they'll > just see these unfinished doc sections. For the sake of argument, > suppose that Valentin could have finished NR 1.8 if he had only > answered half the emails that he did. Wouldn't that be a good > trade-off? I don't think everybody is as reasonable and pragmatic as you are. I'm the complete opposite of you, remember? As you mentioned, I'm concerned about the "general well-being of the project"; in Free Software projects, there are people like you, who try to spend their time the most efficient way, and there are people like me, who are mainly here for selfish reasons: to have fun, to make silly little things, to launch some ideas no matter how crazy they are... We have to take this kind of contributors into account *too*, no matter how unefficient and unreliable they can be on a short or long-term perspective. For the past couple of weeks, I may have been spending a couple hours a *day* working on NR1.8, in addition to my daily opera work and LilyPond maintaining. And yet, I am not nearly finished, as you pointed out. So, I kinda *need* to answer silly mails on -user or work on harp pedal diagrams every now and then. > If we had more people in the doc team, then I wouldn't have > discouraged Carl from doing programming -- we could have people > moving from advanced docs to bugfixing without putting the doc > team in danger. You are absolutely right -- as far as you're dealing with "serious" people in a "serious" world. If some geeks are here "for fun", all you can do is to make it cool: if they have fun at fixing bugs or implementing features (or doing webdesign or drawing comics or whatever they like), then you have to use that as a carrot. > I was really hoping that this "it's all up to you users" would > reduce the 1 in 20 figure as well, but given the complete lack of > users saying "you've made some good points. Sign me up to be on > the Fuzziness Force. I can't answer a lot of questions, but if I > see any question that I *can* answer, I'll do it", I'm not > optimistic. That is actually what led me to start the LilyReport in the first place. We have to show that working on LilyPond is *fun*, that our community is *nice*, etc. Your "it's all up to you" would (will) gain much visibility, featured in a Report issue. Oh, and just in case anyone wonders, I do not have given up with the LilyReport either; I'm actually preparing something new and better for September. Cheers, Valentin _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
