Re: Doc build hanging (with memory leak?)

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> It's not trivial if I have to install custom code in order to submit a
> tiny doc patch!
>
> If I were hacking on LP itself then it would surely be a small issue
> by comparison, but I wasn't, and I don't think small tweak-y
> contributions should be treated this way.

They are treated by the bug squad picking up the suggestion and filing
it in the issue problem.

If someone suggested to you that they will refuse doing that, that
someone was not giving you correct information.

> The workaround which several helpful list members suggested was to
> touch' one of the files for the manual concerned.  The problem with
> this workaround was that it meant that everything in the manual had to
> be rebuilt -- it was much less than a full doc build, but still a
> large build process.  I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything,
> so I asked if there was really no way to get the rebuild to just cover
> my changes and not all the extra untouched material.
>
> ... and at this point someone chipped in with a long and fairly
> unpleasant lecture along the lines of, "Sure, you can read all the
> make documentation and go through the build scripts and rewrite them
> all ...".  It was a big and nasty shock especially as I'd been
> perfectly polite and was eager to contribute.  It was extremely
> demotivating

Yes, it is demotivating.  But you are shooting the messenger in this
case.  If nobody goes through all the make documentation and build
scripts and rewrites them, the dependencies are not there for making the
process faster.

It turns out that, unless I am mistaken, somebody more or less did that.
But he did not, as far as I am aware, start out from a better informed
state than you did.

> and I was quite angry about it, not only on my own behalf but because
> I thought it was an awful way to treat anyone who was actually wanting
> to make a contribution.

If you consider the problems in the LilyPond code base as a personal
insult, you are not likely to have much fun.

> Now, there could be a plenty of reasons why that developer had that
> reaction -- just a bad day, feeling undervalued, too often getting
> complaints about the system without offers to help -- but it really
> made me wonder about the project's attitude to potential contributors.

Have you considered the possibility that he was simply telling you the
truth?

-- 
David Kastrup