Re: Documentation - first impressions of the latest manual

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:45:51 +0100
"Anthony Youngman" <address@hidden> wrote:

> I hate to say it,

That's nice, because I hate to hear it.

> but that comment sounds like "don't bother reporting
> bugs unless you can fix them". That's not the Open Source way ...

The Open Source way is that anybody can fix bugs.  If you start fixing
bugs, great.  If somebody else investigates your reports and fixes
bugs, great.

But the "Open Source way" doesn't mean that I have to waste time trying
to figure out what you're complaining about, especially if those things
have already been fixed.  I'm not telling you to stop reporting bugs;
I'm just telling you that unless you put more thought into these bug
reports, I'm going to ignore them.

Look, I have a limited amount of time and energy I can devote to my
volunteer effort on lilyond.  If I waste time investigating potentially
bogus bug reports from you, then I get less done.  In fact, I get
annoyed at having wasted my time, so in the future I spend less time on
lilypond.


> The reason I guess that is that I've taken a look at "collated files"
> and it has a different example ... I thought "collated files" was
> supposed to be a bunch of regression tests, and IT'S broken!

That happens.  Especially in the devel version.

> So I guess what I'm saying is "it looks like a new feature has busted
> a load of regression tests and examples, and no-one has noticed". My
> personal count is now "two distinct examples, one of them duplicated"
> and there could quite well be more.

We know we have broken regression tests.  Are you offering to help
debug them?  That's the "Open Source way".

If I had a magic wand that I could wave to fix bugs, I'd do it.  But
there is no magic wand.  There's just a bunch of guys working on this
project in their spare time.

- Graham