Re: changes in chord names formatting (1503, 1572) (issue 4981052)

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Nov 04, 2011 at 02:52:32PM +0000, Adam Spiers wrote:
> Hey, give yourselves some credit - at least you're not using CVS;
> *that's* what I would label as dark ages :-)  git is still relatively
> new for many many people.  Also, being short on experience doesn't
> make it impossible, it just means it will take a bit longer to get
> there.

Yes and no.  Suppose you're a windows users.  Suppose you notice a
few typos in the lilypond documentation.  Suppose you want to be
helpful and actually fix it instead of just filing a bug report to
bring out attention to the typos.

The *shortest / easiest* method we have for those people is:
- install virtualbox
- download lilydev
- use a simplified graphical lily-git.tcl to get our source
- edit files in gedit
- compile the docs inside the virtual machine
- commit and create patch using the simplified graphical lily-git.tcl
- send patch by email

When most people look at those steps -- which again, is the
easiest method we have, after continually looking and revamping
this process over the past three years -- they either give up
part-way, or just never start.  If the task appears to be too
hard, it's not a question of time+effort; most people (sensibly)
just give up.

> Sure, it can be improved, but I don't think it's
> worth beating ourselves up about it either.

I'm not beating myself up -- but when I see people spending
literally dozens of hours on tasks that could be automated with
1-3 hours of programming, I hardly think that optimism is the
appropriate response.  :(

> I don't know Patchy, but I agree it certainly sounds like a lot of
> this work could be automated.
> 
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration

Incidently, the latest round of panic is because I switched to
ubuntu oneiric 11.10 instead of staying on 10.04 LTS.  I wanted
the gcc 4.6 toolchain for my Vivi work, but that's caused a huge
ripple of disruption in lilypond.  Other than setting up a
separate computer for lilypond (or maybe dual-booting between
ubuntu 10.04 and 11.10), I can't think of how we could have
avoided this particular mess.

- Graham