Re: it's all up to you users (was: Please forget LM MG NR IR SL AU)

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Valentin Villenave
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 2008/8/18 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
>
>> That seems trivial -- surely everybody knows this already -- so
>> let's discuss a specific example.  I'll pick on Valentin since he
>> won't mind... and also since he's almost a complete opposite of
>> me.
>
> Please do not think of me as a yes-man :-)
>
> (If anything, I'm the kind of guy who can't even say "yes" to the
> "no-man", if you follow me...)


As John said, I'm beating a dead horse... but this is precisely
why I call you a yes-man.  Saying "yes" to everything isn't too
far removed from saying "no" to everything: if you jump from
project to project, nothing ever gets finished, so you might as
well have rejected everything at the beginning.

Ok, people get fuzzy feelings when you get all enthusiastic about
their pet projects -- but if their project doesn't get finished,
those fuzzy feelings won't do much good.

> For the past couple of weeks, I may have been spending a couple hours
> a *day* working on NR1.8, in addition to my daily opera work and
> LilyPond maintaining. And yet, I am not nearly finished, as you
> pointed out. So, I kinda *need* to answer silly mails on -user or work
> on harp pedal diagrams every now and then.

A few hours each day?  We should have discussed this much earlier.

I don't give estimates for doc work so that I can show off how
quickly I can get things done -- besides, I always massively pad
my estimates.  Rather, it's so that a contributer knows that if
he's going way over that time, he's doing someting wrong.

If you're spending a few hours to produce the doc patches you
have, then you're doing something wrong.  I don't think the
problem is in understanding lilypond itself -- you know far more
than me.  Maybe you're doing to much extra research?  Including
too many details?  Too much time creating exercises, or writing
English?

If the majority of your time is spent writing the English, then we
could have easily fixed that: just write the maoing text in
French, and I'll translate.  Or omit the text entirely -- the
post-GDP docs should explain 90% of the material in the examples
themselves.  If you produced good examples, adding the text for
the entire section would take me about 1 hour.
(I imagine the same would be true of Trevor or Carl, instead of
me)


I don't have git access any more (well, I've deleted the source
tree), but I'm still willing to discuss doc writing with you (or
anybody else with git access) if you want to become more efficient
at it.

Again, I'm not claiming that I have some massive innate ability to
write documentation.  I'm just talking about all the experience
and mistakes I made in the past four years.  If you want to get a
lot of work done in a short amount of time, I can teach you.

Cheers,
- Graham