Re: Quit

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Op woensdag 11-11-2009 om 20:08 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef David
Kastrup:

> > As we both (all) know, there IS a "reasonable way to become an expert"
> > at Lilypond
> 
> No.  A _reasonable_ way to become an expert is by reading into
> increasingly more expert-level documentation and working with it.
> 
> "Humanly possible" is not the same as "reasonable".  "Reasonable"
> entails a collective effort not to repeat avoidable work and
> frustration.

Being able to maintain this pov "would be nice".  However, how do
you suggest we get there?  It may well be that you are helping
with the first steps right now: identification of the problem.
The thing with open source/ LilyPond is: someone needs to follow
up and do the work to get from Humanly possible to Reasonable.
Until now, that has not been done yet.  And my question would be:
is it worth it?

Several times we have seen people sending perfect patches or code
right out of the blue, without asking any questions.  Simon
Tatham with his Gonville font being the latest instance I
remember.  This falls in the category of Humanly possible.
Possibly harsh and not enough for some potential contributors.  The
good thing is: it did not cost us any resources.

Also seen several times are people sending /lots/ of questions,
be it users or developers, and after everything has been
answered, the user quits or potential developers says she has no
time or does not thing she is up for it after all.

While I do not have a final verdict on this, it seems safe to
spend most of our development efforts on developing.  You need
to be pretty good to add something to LilyPond and I doubt if
developer documentation/hand-holding is going to make that any 
easier.

> I can't improve what I can't see or understand.

Can you change what you see and then look what happened?

> The topic was why people find Lilypond too cumbersome to use.  I gave
> reasons, and the reaction "please change it yourself" is not addressing
> the topic at all.  It also delivers the impression that the current
> state is basically my fault and responsibility, and nothing needs to be
> done about it that I don't do myself.

Apparently, making this Reasonable is something you consider
to be important.  The thing to do here would be to pick up
that task -- if it's important enough for you.  It is next
to impossible to get people to do what you want by merely
stating that it is important.

Several months ago I tried to coax people to help with the
website and look into SEO ["Do we have the best search terms that
will bring new users/developers in?"].  I argued that most of our
potential users/developers by far (>99%) never heard of LilyPond
yet and I figured that good findability/visibility and
attractiveness of the website were probably of utmost importance.
Well, have you read some of Graham's cries for help?  Noone cares.

Greetings,
Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
Avatar®: http://AvatarAcademy.nl    | http://lilypond.org