Re: PDF Problem

[Mats Bengtsson]

Anyway, it's not a matter a being programmer/hacker or not, it's rather 
a matter of being extremely enthusiastic about your own pet project and 
of working extremely hard on something without getting paid (in money or 
in gratitude). For example, Graham has worked day and night during more 
than a year to bring the documentation into it's current shape and I 
understand that he can feel personally insulted if someone dares 
criticize his own "baby".

I have a couple of friends who are equally driving forces in 
enthusiastically organizing music organizations for amateur players, one 
is heading a chamber music society and the other is heading an 
orchestra. Some people may find them rude since when you come with a 
suggestion on how things can be changed, the immediate reaction is often 
an immediate rejection of the idea. Since they have spent so much 
(unpaid) time on the project, the reaction is natural. Also, I know that 
they often feel that they don't get enough support from other people in 
the board or in the organization, but at the same time they are not so 
good at asking for help and even if somebody has volunteered to assist, 
they often take care of it themselves to get it done the way they want 
it. If you recognize yourself in this description, watch out so you 
don't get burned out.

I think LilyPond is an amazing project from a sociological point of 
view, for several reasons:

- It has survived the transition from being a one man show (well two man 
show), when Han-Wen and Jan spent over 10 years of hacking day and night 
with about one new patch release once a week, to a team driven project 
where both Han-Wen and Jan basically have stepped back since they don't 
have much time left for the project, and other people have taken over 
the main hacking activities.

- Graham's organization of the GDP project, where he got a large number 
of people involved in writing and improving the documentation. 
Especially in the open source community, the documentation is often the 
weakest point and if it's done well it's often done by  a single person.

- ...

I think that in some time, Graham will get a more humble attitude 
towards the outcome of the GDP and realize that no single pedagogical 
model can solve all problems and answer all questions. Myself, I have in 
some sense been at the other end of the scale, spending far too much 
time on answering questions on the mailing list trying to adapt the 
answer to the expected level of knowledge of the person asking the 
question, when I probably would have spent much of the time in a better 
way if I had contributed more to the documentation to avoid getting many 
of the questions.

  /Mats

David Kastrup wrote:
> Aaron Andrew Hunt <address@hidden> writes:
>
>   
> > On May 11, 2009, at 2:24 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> >     
> > > Dewdman,
> > > It might help to read this:
> > > http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/smart-questions.html
> > >       
> > Very interesting link! It might as well be called "In Defense of Being
> > a Complete A-Hole"
> >
> > No, programmers / hackers are smart folks and they are not customer
> > service representatives, but many of them could really stand to be
> > more ... like, uh, "normal" people, you know ... polite?
> >     
>
> People like you seem to confuse the concept of "polite" with "servant".
> Add to that the rather open insinuation that programmers are inferior
> beings that should be naturally serving their "normal" superiors, and
> you are placing yourself in a position where hypocrisy is the
> overwhelming message.
>
> Anyway, your rephrase is not to the point.  If you insist on being rude
> and off-putting (namely a "Complete A-Hole"), you could at least reflect
> the essence by paraphrasing this "How to address Complete A-Holes if you
> intend to make them do work for you".
>
>   

--
=============================================
        Mats Bengtsson
        Signal Processing
        School of Electrical Engineering
        Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
        SE-100 44  STOCKHOLM
        Sweden
        Phone: (+46) 8 790 8463                         
       Fax:   (+46) 8 790 7260
        Email: address@hidden
        WWW: http://www.s3.kth.se/~mabe
=============================================