Re: [frogs] Frog's Lament

[David Kastrup]

Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> writes:

> 2) I think that it always takes developers less time to answer
> questions than to write the patch that you will produce.

I definitely disagree with "always".  I am an old-school Unix wizard
myself, and there are situations when I am administering, say, an Ubuntu
system, and fiddling with the graphical tools and stuff for half an hour
while the owner of the system is looking.  And then I am running out of
time and tell him: "you need to look away now".  Five minutes later, the
system does what it is intended to do.

There is no way that I could have answered all the questions that would
even start to explain what I have been doing in those five minutes.

And there are certainly areas in Lilypond where explanations are much
harder to add than the code was to write.

Those areas are a maintenance risk.  But somebody may have been running
out of time.  And maybe he does not know the answers himself, but just
prodded something until it worked.

Things like that happens, probably quite more with commercially
developed software, in particular closed source.

But an opportunity for improving such a state should not be lightly cast
away.

-- 
David Kastrup