Re: crankiness

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 06:22:28PM +0100, Gerard McConnell wrote:
> "The current person responsible for LSR also happens to be the most
> active patch-reviewer.  Do you *really* want me to ask him to stop
> working on patches (i.e. new features, bug fixes, etc) and waste
> his time playing web-2.0 games that anybody with TWO BLOODY WEEKS
> OF LILYPOND EXPERIENCE could do?!
>  
> The critical word in the above quote is waste.

Yes, it is.  Any time you have an expert doing work that a novice
could do, it's an inefficient use of resources -- in other words,
a waste.  I chose my words carefully, and stand by them.

> I came away from that experience with the
> conviction that good documentation is critically important.

Yes, it is.  But we're not talking about learning basic lilypond
knowledge here; we're looking at advanced tweaks.  People wanting
to do fancy stuff should be prepared to spend half an hour looking
through the relevant part of the docs.

Now, I've wanted somebody to organize these special tweaks for
over two years now, but it's not the most important doc work that
remains unfulfilled.  It *is* the easiest doc work, though -- and
when I rank the importance vs. knowledge required to perform the
work, this particular task is far ahead of anything else.  Hence
my annoyance.


> I believe that If
> Lilypond is to develop the widest possible user base and
> get the recognition it deserves the clarity and conciseness of the
> documentation is perhaps as important as the application itself.  

Having worked on the docs for 4 years and approximately three
thousand hours, you really don't need to convince me.  Just
convince others -- and perhaps yourself -- that it's worth getting
involved.  My work at this point is a meta-contributor: I
contribute (teach) people how to contribute to lilypond.  If
nobody steps forward to do the work, then it doesn't get done.

Cheers,
- Graham