Re: Request for comments: prettify snippets page

[Valentin Villenave]

2007/12/28, Graham Percival <address@hidden>:

> I hate to be a wet blanket (I'm fond of this phrase: "the person
> who stops other people from having fun"), but everything that I've
> learned about documentation project management is screaming "not
> worth the effort".

Lol -- pure vintage Graham Percival ;-)

> - this would require changing LSR.  In my experience, any change,
>   no matter how simple, takes at least one month.  While we're
>   waiting for that change, you'll have a whole bunch of modified
>   files in the build system ready for the new stuff, and I'll
>   still be using the old build system.

AFAIK, now than Sebastiano has released the full LSR sources, we could
have some very concrete changes (maybe even patches) to offer him, and
I'm sure it would no longer take him several weeks to just commit such
changes.
Besides, I'm almost done with my full LSR-reviewing, so sooner or
later we'll have to contact him anyway, to remove the old directories
system.

> If I were to add this to the GDP technical-todo list, it would be
> in the MEDIUM section.  In other words, there are about 10
> technical things that would improve the docs and which I am not
> going to do, which are more important.  (and easier to do!)

Yes. Indeed. However, we have to admit that we all have slightly
different points of view about what's more important and what's more
easy to do. If John has already some concrete solutions in mind, I'd
be very happy to see them. (And I have to say that, as a French
teacher, I found his idea of i18n the LSR, a few weeks ago, quite
interesting too.)

> If you can prove me wrong -- get Sebastiano to change LSR in two
> days, whip up the python scripts in half an hour, and have
> everything beautifully working before the new year -- then great!
> But all of my experience on the docs and snippets suggests to me
> that this will be a lot more work than you think.  :|
> I therefore feel obliged to point out all the problems, in order
> to potentially save you a lot of time/effort/frustration.

Of course, I fully understand your opinion, but sometimes people just
feel like spending useless time "just because". (I know what I'm
talking about: I've been spending three weeks learning NSIS language
just for fun.) Plus, working in open-source *has* to be risky from
times to times; I'm not sure Lilypond would exist at all if Han-Wen
and Jan had be willing to avoid spending time/efforts/frustrations in
the first place.
As for the LSR question, I'm very happy to see that John has been
thinking about possible improvements; if he wants to see if his idea's
going anywhere, I'm ready to help him if I can.

Just a small addition: I've been quite busy in December, but I'm back.
My laptop is broken again (I've been doomed by the Acer curse), and
I'm stuck on a very old Windows box, but thanks to the excellent work
of the msysGit guys I have full access to the Git repository. The only
thing I can't do right now is compile Lilypond (unless the minGW
packages ever get updated, which I doubt).

Cheers,
Valentin