Re: contributing instructions are misleading!

[Janek Warchoł]

2014/1/1 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
> On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 06:35:36PM +0100, Janek Warchoł wrote:
>> 2013/12/12 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
>> > Sorry, this awoke Grumpy Graham.
>>
>> I should have expected that.
>
> Yes, you should have.  :P   Happy new year, BTW.

And you too!

>> Anyway, there are two parts to this cg cleanup:
>> 1) removing obsolete info
>> 2) reorganizing things.
>
> Not quite.  1) is obvious, but equally important is 1.5) update
> incorrect info.  Remember this latest iteration of interest in the
> CG happened because one or two new contributors tried to follow
> the published (incorrect) info, got into trouble, and
> understandably were irritated.

You're right that updating incorrect info is important.  However, as
far as i remember there's not much _incorrect_ info left - the problem
that we have now is more that the information is confusing:
duplicated, placed in unexpected places, etc.

> Reorganizing is a seductively easy thing to propose, but it's
> dangerous.  It's easy to have opinions about how things should be
> structured, so it's a huge bike-shed debate.  Any proposal to
> change the chapters and sections in the CG will involve at least
> two weeks of debate on -devel.  Can you honestly say that another
> argument like that would not reduce your motivation?  It would be
> a shame if a bunch of good suggestions got lost (or delayed by a
> few months) because they were wrapped up in a "reorganization"
> patch.  Just look at the proposed website changes from a week or
> two ago.

Well, i'll try to be careful about that.  In any case, i have little
time (and will have less in the next weeks), so i'll drop large-scale
reorganization at the moment.

> As an added bonus, if you make dozens of obviously good updates to
> the CG over weeks and months, then people will gradually recognize
> you as an authority on the subject.  Then if/when you propose some
> reorganizations, they'll be less skeptical.

I wish i had lots of time so that i could plan long-term investments
like that ;-)
But you're right about breaking changes into small, self-contained and
uncontroversial parts.

>> > More thinking and discussion than we had the previous 4 times we
>> > reorganized the CG?
>>
>> Quite frankly, i'm pretty sure that i gave CG more thought than all of
>> us combined since Waltrop 2012 ;-)
>
> and before Waltrop, I spent 100x more time&effort on the CG than
> you did.  Your point?

Ah, you're absolutely right!
My point is The Golden Rule: he who does the work, makes the rules ;-)
(of course i don't mean that one who does the work can ignore things
the others say)

>> Also, times change and stuff like CG gets out of date - even if it was
>> ok after previous reorganization, it doesn't mean that a new
>> reorganization isn't warranted, don't you think?
>
> Not really.  We still have contributors who need encouragement and
> an overview of development.  We still (I think) have lilydev, and
> that's still (I think) no easier way to get started.  We still
> have documentation, a website, programming in C++ and scheme, etc.
>
> Granted, the previous plans about having "mentors" fell apart, so
> those parts of the CG should be removed.  But other than that, I
> think a reorganization would mostly be a distraction away from
> fixing incorrect info.

I don't mean to remove information about lilydev, docs, programming
introduction etc.  I'm mostly thinking about moving this info around.

best,
Janek