Re: CG chapter 2, first draft

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 4:03 AM, Mark Polesky <address@hidden> wrote:
> Graham Percival wrote:
>> I think a fair chunk of it will be wasted effort, but it's
>> *your* effort to waste.
>
> Geez, Graham, sometimes I wish you *would* mince a few words
> from time to time!  I don't think it's a waste at all.
...
> *That's* where the waste is.  The intent of my revisions is
> to prevent these stupid traps for the next generation of
> contributors.  Get them up and running as painlessly as
> possible.

Why do you think I pushed so hard on the lily-git thing?  If that
wasn't working, then I'd agree that the CG git chapter was
priority-critical.  But now that we *do* have lily-git, I'd say that
lily-git instructions are priority-critical, lilypond+doc building
instructions are priority-high, and generic git instructions are
priority-medium.  Medium because newbies won't need them (they'll be
using lily-git), and because there's already tons of git instructions
out there.

Now, Carl has told me off for complaining about new programmers
working on new features instead of "annoying / embarrassing" bugs like
#37 (beamings going through noteheads); he quite rightly pointed out
that (some) new features are actually an easier way to learn about
lilypond rather than working on bugs.  But you're an experienced doc
worker, so you don't need to work on the git chapter to learn the
ropes.  I see a lot of hard work going into an item that isn't the
most critical problems; that strikes me as inefficient, which led to
my "waste" comment.

If I were to be brutally honest, I'd have to admit that I'm actually
jealous of you and Trevor, since you have the luxury of working on an
item to completion and doing a good job on it.  I'm _almost_ finished
the changes that Carl suggested for the website, but now that John's
updated stable, I need to drop that work and start figuring out how to
get GUB to make 2.12.3-2.  I have no interest in the stable branch or
the translations, and little interest in fighting with GUB over this,
but it would take literally dozens of hours for anybody else (other
than Jan), so I'm stuck doing it.  When I return to the website in a
week, I'll just have to pick up the pieces I left and figure out what
I was doing.

However, that doesn't excuse my comment that your work was a waste.
You're doing a good job, and it's a task that needs to be done.  The
fact that we don't have exactly the same priorities is no reason to
disparage your work, and I apologize for that.

- Graham