Re: contributing instructions are misleading!

[Urs Liska]

Am 01.01.2014 15:47, schrieb 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.

I think there is something to this observation, I can confirm that from 
the perspective of the "target group". I'm not ready yet to point to 
what is "wrong", but I can say that the information I needed for my 
recent work was hard to find and resides in "unexpected places".

> > 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.

I can second this too (Graham's and Janek's comment).
While I was first quite frustrated by the outright rejection of my 
well-meant and substantial contributions to the website structure 
recently, we all managed to calm down and continue with a constructive 
discussion. Now, after my first successfull patches I've gained enough 
confidence in the review process not to perceive objections as a general 
unwillingness to change established content/behaviour. And I assume the 
others have noticed that I'm not stubbornly insisting on my proposals.
I have postponed some of the problematic issues (e.g. I completely 
ignored the navigational structure when updating the "Features" page), 
but I will come back later to these once all non-controversial things 
have been done. At that time I will have gained some "authority on the 
subject" and at the same time will see which parts of my original 
suggestions weren't necessary or could be modified to become 
non-controversial.

> > > 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.

That's a point I'd like to say something about.
The CG's insistence on Lilydev can be somewhat offputting. I didn't 
think I'd need Lilydev and wasn't keen on installing a virtual machine 
only to run a (presumably outdated) Ubuntu inside an up-to-date Linux. 
But you're led to believe that LilyDev is the canonical environment for 
working on LilyPond, and if you dare to go another route you'll be on 
your own and heading for trouble.

Urs