list of policy questions added to Contributor's Guide

[Graham Percival]

It's now been a week since report 22 came out and the -hackers
drama began.

The positive outcome is:
- we pushed an 18-line patch to the CG which says "there is a
  dormant lilypond-hackers mailing list, which we'll sort out
  after 2.14 is out".

The neutral outcome is our policies -- there was no change there.
Looking back at the infamous 18 Sep email:
http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg30917.html
- "The list of members of this group will be public."
- "this list hasn't been used for a few years,"
- "I'm currently in the process of finding out who's on it,"
- "nothing starts until 2.14 is out"

The negative outcome is our time, energy, and motivation.  The
latter two are difficult to judge, but I would estimate that this
whole affair has occupied 15-20 hours of developer time (adding up
all the time spent reading+writing messages and patches).  That
corresponds to approximately one week of 2.14-related work.

Could it have been different?  I could easily imagine it going
down in less than one hour:
----- <fiction>
V to L-D: hey guys, you know that lilypond-hackers mailing list
that Graham mentioned back in Sep?  I'm really concerned that it
isn't mentioned in the CG.
G: umm, did you read that email?  There's not much _to_ mention
yet, and I don't want to postpone 2.14 to deal with it right now.
V: you could at least mention that it exists, and that you will
clarify it once 2.14 is out.
G: ... you want us to mention a mailing list that we haven't
organized in the official docs?  waste of time.
C: I'm not certain that this is a very important matter, but there
is certainly no harm clarifying it.  Here's a patch, can we push?
G: ... well, if you've gone to the trouble of writing it anyway,
sure, go ahead.
----- </fiction>

I don't think it's a terribly unrealistic exchange -- you'll note
that I was rude and Carl was diplomatic.


In retrospect, though, I can't blame people for not reading the 18
Sep email.  The whole point of the Contributor's Guide was to
avoid this kind of problem.  In fact, I began that email itself by
writing about "reducing the amount of 'oral tradition'... our
policies have been explained in bits and pieces in emails, which
makes it hard for beginners to get started".  By pointing people
at that email, I was making exactly the problem that I have been
trying to resolve for over a year.

I apologize for not adding this stuff to the Contributor's Guide
from the very beginning.  I thought that I could "get away" with
emails to lilypond-devel and a webpage on the official
  http://lilypond.org/~graham/gop.html
, but that was not good enough.


I have therefore used most of my "free" lilypond time for this
week rewriting the GOP and GLISS material into the Contributor's
Guide.  Commits
  0c4a55d8e4d3883a9034be276ed89b78efb3cccd
  d6532ec38597f228ec5516f81bd5200043b2e5f9
add CG 11.4 GOP and CG 11.5 GLISS.  I will update the webpage to
point to those locations once 2.13.39 is out and the updated CG is
on the web.

I have also added some more information about the expected amount
of preparatory work for each policy discussion, and the estimated
time the discussion will take.  At the present time, there is an
estimated 30 hours of prep work, and 125 hours of discussion.
Hopefully this will clarify why I believe that starting GOP now
would negatively impact the 2.14 release.

I should reserve the remainder of my time this week for mentoring
my doc contributor and emails.  The 2.13.39 release (and therefore
the first version of the rewritten GOP material on the web) will
therefore most likely happen next Monday 15 Nov.

- Graham