Re: website draft 4, help wanted

[Carl D. Sorensen]

On 7/8/09 6:27 PM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> Now for *my* rant.
> 
> As I've said before, I stopped using lilypond 4-5 years ago.  Last
> Fall, I briefly got back into improving the engraving of my old
> compositions, but that stopped when I went to Singapore.
> 
> So why am I still around?  I'm really bugged by inefficiency.
> Users ask questions, Mats gives the same answers over and over
> again: inefficient.  So I improved the docs.
> 
> I decide to leave, but remember that it took me two weeks to get
> my first patch, it was horribly frustrating, and it was horribly
> inefficient.  So I started GDP to train my replacements.
> 
> Potential contributors can't figure out git, ask questions, we
> have the same confused discussion over and over again:
> inefficient.  So I started the CG.
> 
> Potential programmers can't figure out how to get started, and the
> existing programmers have learned that most well-intentioned
> offers of programing never pan out when they have to actually do
> work, so they ignore all those requests about getting started:
> inefficient.  Another reason to start the CG, and to continually
> nag people to dump instructions in the CG.
> (we direct new contributors to the CG, so that they can
> demonstrate their willingness and ability to do work.  Then we
> know that it's worth spending hours helping and training them,
> rather than hoping that an unknown contributor will be in the
> 25-40% of new contributors who will actually stick around)
> 
> 
> You know what kind of website I think we should have?  I think we
> should have whatever website the community is willing to make.  So
> far, "the community that's willing to make" a website consists of
> me, Patrick, Jonathan, and Francisco.  Plus many others who give
> suggestions... but when it comes to actually sitting down and
> writing the content, hacking the perl, and whatnot, it's just us.
> 
> Which, in itself, is a horrible waste.  Every hour that I spend
> working on the website is an hour that I'm not working on writing
> instructions about how to make releases.  Whenever I retire from
> building releases, I don't want my replacement to spend *another*
> 5 months trying to figure out how to build the regtests correctly
> or run the upload script.
> 
> Every hour I spend on the website is an hour that I'm not
> rearranging LM 1 and the AU.  You know, we had a sincere offer to
> help write docs for alternate editors, 2 or 3 weeks ago.  But
> *that* can't be done until I've made the space for that in LM 1.
> 
> Every hour I spend on the website is an hour that I'm not
> investigating+discussing Reinhold's ajax-search stuff, which I
> *promised* that I'd do "in 1 week" on June 23.
> 
> Every hour I spend on the website is an hour that I'm not checking
> over the CG, which needs to be done before we can start GOP, which
> is a (the?) prime time to gather more contributors.
> 
> Every hour I spend on the website is an hour that I'm not writing
> another column for the LilyPond Report, which may or may not be
> holding up the next issue.
> 
> Every hour I spend on the website is an hour that I'm not dealing
> with the 58 emails containing material which should be added or
> fixed in the docs.  (and yes, all your GDP graduates reading this,
> I _am_ slightly miffed at you.  I spent a lot of time training you
> 21 people so that I wouldn't have to deal with this stuff any
> more)
> 
> Every hour I spend on the website is an hour that I'm not starting
> my own Tadpole stuff, which is particularly annoying since I was
> really hoping to start doing programming bugfixes myself, this
> summer.
> 
> 
> Given all those tasks... and all the potential contributor effort
> that's waiting for me to finish those tasks... it really doesn't
> make sense for me to be gathering a list of productions and
> nagging famous lilypond users to send pictures.  Which,
> thankfully, I've offloaded to Jonathan.  But it also doesn't make
> sense for me to be rewriting the Old News from the current website
> into texinfo to add to the new website, but I'll probably end up
> doing that.
> 
> In some ways, I actually cringe more when I see Patrick working on
> the website.  Not because he doesn't do a great job of the CSS and
> perl hacking (he *does* do a great job of this), but because he
> could be working on so many other things.  CSS isn't hard; there's
> dozens of users that _could_ be doing it.  But improving the SVG
> backend of lilypond _is_ hard.  Nobody else is doing _that_.
> Fixing build bugs in GUB is hard; you and he are the only people
> currently working on that.  Frankly, if the really annoying
> lilypond bugs like #34 (grace notes) ever get fixed, there's a
> good chance it'll be done by Patrick.  So why the bloody mao is he
> the main person working on the CSS?  We should get a relatively
> inexperienced contributor / web-savvy user to do that stuff.
> 
> 
> *That* is why I'm not going to spend (significant) time screwing
> around with the appearance.  If somebody is seriously interested
> in this task, I'll gladly mentor them.
> 
> You know the phrase "in a democracy, the population receives the
> government they deserve"?  That's how I feel about lilypond.  The
> community receives the program/documentation/website they deserve.

Gee, Graham, tell us how you *really* feel. ;)

But I totally agree with you.  CSS should be somebody else, preferably
somebody besides either you or Patrick.

Thanks,

Carl