Re: that acciaccatura issue

[Thomas Morley]

2016-08-23 3:42 GMT+02:00 Flaming Hakama by Elaine <address@hidden>:
>
>> What hinders you *in trying* to create a minimum example?
>
>
> 1) Because it is veers toward being a ridiculous and arbitrary criteria.
> Speaking for myself, the example presented in this case was ***clearly***
> small enough to debug.

True, and my first step was reducing it to a minimal.

> In my opinion, anyone saying otherwise either has a
> tangential axe to grind, or is not familiar enough with the language to be
> of help.

Then I should unsuscribe from the user-list

(...]
> But to say things to the effect of "anyone helping you will have to start by
> creating a minimal example" is uber-rubbish.

disagreed

[...]
> If I were to critique the code in this case, I would rather emphasize the
> awkward formatting:  Line up your opening and closing braces, and use more
> consistent indentation, and more of it.  It is far easier to read pages of
> well-formatted code than it is to comprehend a single convoluted expression.

agreed

[...]
> 2) Because often much of the "non-minimal" code comes straight out of the
> docs.  What kind of culture suggests that quoting code based on the docs is
> unfit for the basis of discussion on a user group?

Code in the docs shows use-cases. On the user-list we discuss and try
to solve problems. This is not the same.

> Because minimal examples fetishize the minutia of lilypond while obscuring
> the normal complexity present even in meager scores, such that it becomes
> needlessly complicated to apply the fix.   I find it counterproductive to
> suggest that one should reduce an example to be smaller than what is
> *musically* necessary--in particular, in terms of the number of staves or
> voices in use.

disagreed

> Hammering on people to conform to the minimal example causes people to have
> extra iterations on the list, and wastes everyone's bandwidth:
>   * a reasonable (or possibly non-reasonable) example,
>   * a follow-up (attempt at a) minimal example (it will never truly be
> minimal),
>   * once a solution is suggested, a follow-up about how to solve the actual
> problem in the first place, since it was not clear how to apply the solution
> of the minimal example to the actual score, which has additional necessary
> complexity.
>
> Wouldn't it have been better to just provide a response to the first
> reasonable request?

The user list serves (at least) two goals:
- A user may get an urgent problem solved
- follow-up readers may learn how to solve similiar problems

This is done best with minimal-examples, for both cases.

> 3) My question to people complaining about the non-minimal-ness of this
> example is:  Precisely which of these lines caused you to any extra time to
> debug?

See my first post in this thread.

> This was not a rambling several screens of undistilled raw source,
> but about two dozen lines, much of which is boilerplate.
>
> The things you took out to make it minimal:  did you take these out just to
> prove a point, or did you ***honestly*** think that removing, for example,
> the names of staves and voices, key signature, clefs, or reducing a piano
> staff to a parallel music expression would actually identify or solve the
> problem with the duplicate time signature?

Without reducing it to a minimal example I wouldn't have spotted the
problem, i.e. \key creating a not grace-synchronisized Bottom-context.

> I don't think that anyone in this discussion misunderstands *how* to create
> a truly minimal example.  It's just that there is an open question about how
> relevant it is, especially beyond a certain point.
>
> Almost more importantly, there is also concern about the impact of how the
> attitude conveyed on this list about the requirements for minimal examples
> is a deterrent to cultivating the lilypond community.

I should unsuscribe from the user-list.

> I understand the intention of the requests (although not demands) for
> minimal examples.  But, as someone who has spent a lifetime developing and
> debugging code, I can assure you that these demands are strictly
> unnecessary, and come across as whiny and unprofessional.

I should unsuscribe from the user-list.

> It should be possible to encourage people to improve their code, provide
> reasonable guidelines for submissions, and not come across as hostile or
> insulting.


If my replies came across as hostile or insulting, please accept my apologies.
It was not intended at all. As a non-native speaker this happens
sometimes to me, though.


Cheers,
  Harm