Re: list of policy questions added to Contributor's Guide

[Valentin Villenave]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 11:38 PM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> It's now been a week since report 22 came out and the -hackers
> drama began.

To no avail, I'm afraid. (see below)

> 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,"

Oh, I didn't remember that part. You mean, *even you* have no idea
who's on it? Well, that's reassuring.

... If anything, this helps me make my point that -hackers is a thing
from the past: you should have been appointed as administrator or
moderator of this list long ago.

> - "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.

If that's the amount of time needed so that we can work better
together in the long run, so be it. That being said, apart from you,
Carl and Joe I'm not sure that this whole thing has taken that much
developer time.
I'd have been fine with a two-lines answer from Han-Wen on that, and I
don't think it would have taken him a lot more time to write than his
recent "don't answer silly questions from Guatemalan students" email.
On the contrary, not getting *anything*, in some way, made it clear
that my feeling disrespect towards contributors, wasn't so unfounded
after all.

> 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.

Uh, you're assuming that this mail from me would have been actually
read and answered in the first place. :-)
Considering what happened to your own announcement, and to Xavier's
email... I'm not so sure about that. If anything, this stunt of mine
made the problem at hand slightly harder to ignore.

> I apologize for not adding this stuff to the Contributor's Guide
> from the very beginning.

Well, in turn, I have to apologize for engaging in what could look
like a personal feud against the whole -hackers group, regarded as a
together-standing "club" of obnoxious and condescending people (which
it, obviously, is not). To say that I wasn't highly disappointed and
frustrated by the way my concerns were(n't) addressed, however, would
be inaccurate. (And, yes: I do know I'm in no place to make demands,
etc.)

Anyway. Let's work together and get things done!

Cheers,
Valentin.