Re: delaying new website after 2.14

[John Mandereau]

2009/7/11 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
> - unless we delay 2.14 by a month or two... or four or five... the
>  translations won't be ready.

Let's give two weeks to update/translate new files marked with
priority 1, then let's consider the translations are ready to move to
the new website and are ready for the release.



> What about switching to the new website, but adding a note on the
> first page to say that it hasn't been translated yet, but those
> preferring other languages can browse the old website *here link*?

This is better than your previous proposal, but I again I prefer that
pages with most priority are translated before this.



> - no native support for texinfo (yet?), so we need to write custom
>  Builders.  This results (as far as I can see) a bunch of extra
>  framework, which just boils down to re-creating the Makefile
>  rules in a more verbose format.

Yes, except that these rules should be reusable for other software
packages.


>If you're interested,
> compare:
> web-gop/texinfo/GNUmakefile
> web-gop/texinfo/SConstruct
>  (which doesn't include all the functionality of the makefile)

I will after July 15th.


> In addition, even if we *did* replace the Documentation/ build
> with SCons, we'd still need to do some ugly hackery to get "make
> dist" to work and whatnot.

Of course.


> Basically, my misadventures on Wed night / Thurs day  (the essay
> stuff, not getting much done in SCons, and accidently losing an
> hour's worth of stuff in git) left me really dispirited and
> disinterested in any future build or python stuff.

Gosh, did you really expect to get anything from Scons almost ready
to build the website in one hour, starting from scratch? And did you
expect to get a working makefile without testing it with appropriate care?
I wouldn't dare expecting this, and it would be a challenge even for a
genius.



> I'm a computer science guy starting a PhD, and he's a professor of
> music.  Yes, neither of us have spent hours reading the git
> docs... but why should we require contributors to spend time on
> that?  It's a huge turn-off.

Agreed, see what I just sent on -user about this.


> I just think that the current makefile/stepmake system is a bit
> too far on the "making it hard for future contributors" side.

It's rather just a bit too far on "the time I spend in the building
infrastructure would be better spend in implementing user-visible
changes and packaging".


>  If
> I understood them, I'd spend a few hours rewriting code to make it
> easier for other people, so that whenever I left, the remaining
> contributors wouldn't have to puzzle through them so much.

Some parts of Lily makefiles could be made simpler, but this
won't make them easier for people; I welcome proof of the
opposite. And see my final paragraph about what I think
you actually mean.


>> >            v = '.'.join (['%d' % vc for vc in v])
> uh-huh.  What's v supposed to contain?  What's vc?

I don't know without more context, and don't want to know:
this line of code converts an iterable of integers to strings
and join those strings with periods; then, looking at the
context of this code line in format-page.py, it's IMHO obvious
that it's version number string formatting and more explicit
names instead of 'v' and 'vc' aren't needed to be understand
by moderately experienced programmers. This example
is a bit contrived, as these variables have a scope of only a
few lines, and all high-level variables around this code have
explicit names.


> This arose because web-gop doesn't do any version substitution
> (the @DEVEL-LINK@ and stuff), and I was hoping that I could adapt
> scripts/format-page.py to do it.  But after reading a bit of the
> script, I decided to leave this for somebody else.

Frankly, you must have already done harder things; why do you
point out code style nitpicks as reasons to decide you are not
interested to fix them and adapt them for the new web site? Would
have spend more time than the authors of these scripts to give all
variables long explicit names for such a boring task as some
text substitution in HTML pages? I'm pushing a bit too much, but
given the state of the essay makefile you pushed, this is a fair
game.

Best,
John

PS Im' going to be completely offline from tomorrow in the morning
until Wed. July 15th.