Re: improving the CG

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 02:16:19PM +0000, Ian Hulin wrote:
> Trevor did a brilliant job with the Windows section and in some respects  
> it's clearer and less forbidding than the material in 1.1 to 1.4.  It  
> also duplicates a lot of the material in those sections.

With respect, I disagree.  Trevor explains things.  Most
contributors don't want to learn git; they just want to improve
lilypond.  You don't need to understand git to improve lilypond --
just look at what *I* manage to do without understand git.  The
first thing I see in 1.5.1 is a wall of text talking about SHA-1
and stuff.  My eyes glaze over and I immediately start to skim,
because clearly the text isn't important.

I just want to copy&paste, go get a coffee, then start editing
files.


Now, I'm not opposed to a set of quick instructions that work for
both linux and windows, and somewhere else have huge walls of text
that explains stuff.  I mean, as long as it's obvious that one is
the "short+sweet" version, and the other is the long explanations,
I can tell new contributors to read the one that appeals to them.

If you want to rework CG 1 in that way (merging the OS-specific
stuff generally), that's ok.  But don't destroy the witty brevity
of the short&sweet stuff.


> If you're already addressing this, Mark, or you think this is a terrible  
> idea, Graham, then I'll butt out and leave it to you.

I think that the amount of effort you're proposing to spend on
CG 1 would be better spent on making the lilycontrib gui work.
Then new contributors (on any OS!) don't need to know anything
about git, and don't even need to copy&paste instructions.  They
just have 3 or 4 buttons to click.  Issue 854.

Cheers,
- Graham