Re: Plan for discussions

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 09:59:49AM +0200, Janek Warchoł wrote:
> On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 9:19 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> >> What about a real-life meeting?  There will be a GNU conference in
> >> Dusseldorf (west Germany) in second half of July, maybe we could meet
> >> there for a couple of days and sort out some big picture stuff?  I
> >> think that discussing LilyPond live for one day will give us better
> >> results than a month of mailing lists discussions.
> >
> > I could offer accommodation and discussion room (and accordions) for a
> > few people in Waltrop, rural location about 50 miles from Düsseldorf (10
> > miles from Dortmund).  Wait, we're all metric, right? 80 and 15 it is,
> > then.  There is a piano here as well, but its tuning is sort of rural,
> > too.  Oh, and Internet of course.  Hm, there would be a guitar somewhere
> > that is, while not fabulous, also not exactly supermarket trash.  A
> > master keyboard too, and several Midi expanders.  And reasonable room.
> 
> Cool!  That's something like +1000000 from me :)

That's a very nice offer from David, and it would be great if we
could take him up on it, either in July or August.

However, I am opposed to any "official" (GOP or GLISS) proposals
being decided at such a venue.  We have developers and
contributors around the world, and it would be horribly unfair to
people in Brazil or Australia if 3-4 people gathered in Germany
and decided stuff.

Such a venue could be absolutely wonderful for technical matters
(be they bugfixes, new features, or updating docs to match program
behaviour).  However, I would urge that such work still go through
the normal countdown process.  On a mundane organizational level,
the patches could go straight to a dev/waltrop branch (without
countdowns), and then over the next week(s) the commits from that
branch would be considered (and if necessary re-worked) for
staging.

Similarly, we could have informal discussions about GOP or GLISS
issues, to find out what the main concerns and options are.
However, the result of that discussion would merely be a better
introduction to the debate (i.e. write the question in a clearer
manner, prepare additional materials so that people can examine
some graphical output, prepare a report about bugs reported or git
commits, etc.


I don't want to discourage the gathering at Waltrop, especially
since I've wanted to hire (or "rent" or whatever the term is) a
horseback ride for ages, but just consider how you'd feel if I met
Colin Campbell at the Calgary Stampeed and we decided what the
final solution to the s1*0 <> would be.  You'd be pretty pissed
off at us, and justifiably so!

I agree that email discussions can lead to additional
misunderstandings, long latency, and can be frustrating, but they
are the fairest way to conduct such business with our
international team.  Even a simple IRC or skype chat is difficult
to coordinate; it is virtually impossible schedule one for a dozen
people, and we have more than a dozen people who will be
interested in GOP and GLISS questions.

- Graham