Re: developers developers developers

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 12:55:08PM -0800, Tim Reeves wrote:
> Graham wrote:
> > 
> > For the record, **I have never recommended that somebody use
> > lilypond**.  When meeting a technically-oriented composer,
> > especially one working on algorithmic music, I might suggest that
> > they should check it out.  But I think the original poster was
> > entirely justified in switching back to Finale.
> > 
> > That's why I cringe a bit whenever I hear people proudly
> > announcing that they advertized lilypond to meeting X or
> > conference Y.
> 
> I'm surprised. What about the beautiful output and flexibility? If they 
> don't like the learning curve, what's the loss?

I'm not concerned about the learning curve; I'm concerned about
the mountain of bugs that aren't being addressed.  If somebody
sees terrible output (say, printing two signatures if there's a
\partial right before a tempo change, or a beam colliding with a
notehead (!))... the only answers I can give is:
- yeah, that sucks.  If you add a whole bunch of arcane commands
  specific to each instance, you can avoid it.
- fix it yourself.

The situation is better than it was a few months ago, but we're
still accumilating more bug reports than we're fixing.  I'm
concerned that people might try lilypond, encounter a few
problems, then get turned off because of the relatively unhelpful
(but honest!) answers.


Again, the only solution is to get more people involved.  Is it
easy?  No, but the only way to make it easier for new developers
is for more people to join, learn stuff, then write about what
they learned.

Alternately, I could train them to do (some of) my jobs.  Then *I*
can go through the pain of learning X, Y, and Z, writing about
said tasks, so that other people can tackle those jobs while I can
pursue even harder stuff.


But if nobody (or few people... thanks Kieren and Simon!) steps
forward, then the *current* developers will get more and more
overworked and stressed out, and start dropping like flies.
Frankly, I started considering dropping out a month ago, and
that's looking more and more appealing every day.

Cheers,
- Graham