On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 07:25:27AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote: > While I applaud the magnitude of your conscience, I consider your sense > of responsibility overblown. I would have no qualms encouraging people > into trying to get involved.
That's because you are an excellent programmer, mathematician, and all-round "technical guy" who would have no trouble learning git if you didn't know it already. I am not -- at best I'd say that I'm a good programmer, almost competent mathematician, and passable "technical guy". So I have a great deal of empathy for people who have difficulty with those. More to the point, I have experience mentoring over 20 people for lilypond doc work. I *know* that people find it difficult. I know that people find it difficult even when somebody else takes care of all the git stuff for them! If you want me to listen to anybody who says "oh, there's some friction, but just tell them to jump in", then mentor at least 5 people who stick around for at least 3 months. > Now if things are as bad as to make 80% give up eventually, it > means that 20% eventually manage to contribute. At the "karma cost" of wasting the time and effort of the 80%. I'm not willing to pay that cost -- especially when we could cut that in half with 10-20 hours of prep work. If it was just a general "yeah, only 20% of people survive", then I could roll with that. But "yeah, you only have a 20% chance of doing anything, but that could be 60% if I could be bothered to spend a week or two preparing stuff" strikes me as immoral. Or, to put it in a more cold-blooded way: I want to get the reputation of treating lilypond volunteers well, since that will encourage more people to volunteer. By discouraging people from having a hard time now, I'm gambling on a long-term benefit in that when the CG is better and we actively recruit volunteers, more people will step up. - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
