Blast! Resubmitted with apologies -- sent this a short while ago with an inept subject heading. Sorry, Philip
_________________________________ Graham Percival wrote: > I cannot in good conscience encourage anybody to become involved > with lilypond development at the present time unless they have a > mentor. David Kastrup wrote: >I would have no qualms encouraging people >into trying to get involved. > >They can expect some friction, naturally, work they do unnecessarily. >That's a possible source of frustration. It can be minimized by asking >for feedback. Now if things are as bad as to make 80% give up >eventually, it means that 20% eventually manage to contribute. > >20% is more than the 0% we get following your recommendations. Graham Percival wrote: >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. David Kastrup wrote: >Now if things are as bad as to make 80% give up eventually, it >means that 20% eventually manage to contribute. Graham Percival wrote: >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. > >[...] 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. I wasn't expecting this to be a tension-free exercise, especially having followed some other recent threads with interest. Nor am I going to deflate if an expanded cheatsheet doesn't materialize or doesn't attract any interest. I'm not especially tough-skinned, but I have some time on my hands and the challenge appeals to me. Equally, however, I don't feel inclined, at least at present, to dive into what for me would be the LilySwamp of Texinfo, Lilydev and git. What I would like to attempt, for my part, is to make some contribution from the perspective of a (comparative but not utter beginner) user of the non-programmer variety, and it seems to me that expanding and improving the content of a cheatsheet might be both useful and within my capacity to achieve. While Graham and David may not see eye-to-eye on some questions of approach and how best to manage user contributions, I don't feel discouraged by what either of them has said so far as my working on such a task is concerned, so I intend to just do it, keeping my aims fairly modest, and see what the reaction is, if any, to the result. I don't think I need any technical mentoring at this stage, although I'll definitely be pleased to get feedback -- from anyone -- on drafts. Cheers, Philip _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
