Re: delaying new website after 2.14

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Graham
Percival<address@hidden> wrote:

> 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.

I think you give up very easily.  If this is your pain threshold, you
should reconsider making sweeping contributions of the 'let me replace
the build system' type.

>> > IMO, "ease of understanding" is the most important part
>> > of a build system or build-related script.  Most people helping
>> > with lilypond these days *don't* know a lot about makefiles,

You have clearly never been a developer.   We experimented with
various systems, including SCons and standard autotools.   We had the
lilypond build at one point down to 17secs idle time, that is: when
starting a compile, scons would grind for 17 secs until it had decided
whether or not to compile anything.  This is a complete pain in the
behind because it stalls the edit-compile-debug cycle badly.  In fact,
I recently learned of some large projects considering to moving their
build system from SCons back to Make.

You think the time invested in learning the build system is bad, but
it's really peanuts compared to learning about the rest of the
internals.  I find it disappointing that I read a lot of complaints,
but see no specific questions or suggestions how to improve things.

I think it is naive to think that throwing away stepmake and starting
something scons based will really solve things.  If anything, it will
just shift problems around.

>> Then spend some time reading both Lily makefiles and GNU Make
>> manual; just make sure to plan one week of vacation for this or
>> spread it across a few months :-P
>
> But IMO this shouldn't be necessary -- just like my complaints
> about git.  Jonathan and I *both* lost 1-2 hours of work, and lost
> even more motivation, due to git conflicts on Wed.
>
> 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.  We want to work on lilypond, not on
> learning shell-script-of-the-week.  Me spending a week reading the
> GNU make manual as a prerequisite to moving the Essay into a new
> manual so I have space to talk about alterante editors is *not* a
> good use of time.  It means that I spend a week *not* doing
> anything directly related to lilypond, not to mention the
> frustration.

D'oh.  LilyPond is a software package.  To participate in it's
development, you will have to learn to understand how development
tools work.  If you think stepmake is bad, I invite you to write some
autoconf scripts to get a taste for how clean it actually is.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen