Re: [GOP2-0] why are we losing developers? a pseudo-anonymous survey

[Trevor Daniels]

Graham Percival wrote Wednesday, June 13, 2012 3:52 AM

> If you were a lilypond developer at any point in time, was your
> motivation to work on lilypond reduced due to "problematic
> reasons" which you are comfortable sharing with us in this
> pseudo-anonymous fashion?  What were those reasons or the
> circumstances?

I'm replying directly as I have nothing to say in secret.

There have been moments of disagreement with other developers
that left me feeling annoyed and occasionally put down rather
disrespectfully, sometimes to the extent that I decided to
disconnect from LilyPond altogether, but that feeling never
lasted more than a day or so, and I have no lasting ill-feeling
to anyone on the lists.

But it is true I contribute far less than I did :  compared to the
time when I was actively involved in writing documentation I now
essentially contribute nothing.  There are several reasons for this,
but none of them are to do with what Graham calls "problematic
reasons."  Serious involvement with LilyPond, be it as a user,
developer or doc-writer, requires a serious commitment of
time and effort.  For me, and probably for most others, that level
of dedication can be maintained only for so long.  All the things
in life that were neglected during the period of my devotion to LP
eventually become so pressing that the LP work has to be
abandoned in order to attend to them.  This was the main reason
for my ceasing to work on documentation.

Since then I've dipped in and out of LP work, but I find contributing
on a casual basis difficult.  My usual working environment is
MS Windows, and I developed scripts which enabled me to
write, test and push documentation patches within that environment.
All my doc work was done in this way, but following a change of
machine, texi2html no longer works under Windows.  The alternative 
of firing up a VM to run Ubuntu works fine but it is, I find, an
unattractive proposition on my small laptop due to the effect it has
on Windows.

So I think these are "good reasons", and anyway I've not "left"
LilyPond, just not as involved as I used to be.  I suspect those that
have truly left will simply not bother replying to Graham's request.

Trevor