Re: Add Code of Conduct (issue 575620043 by address@hidden)

[David Kastrup]

Benkő Pál <address@hidden> writes:

> Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> ezt írta (időpont: 2020.
> febr. 6., Cs, 0:32):
>>
>> I'll try to speak only on the most pressing points to avoid bloating the
>> discussion unnecessarily.
>>
>> I stopped contributing to LilyPond about 6 years ago. One cause of that
>> change was that I got a job and suddenly had much less time. But it was not
>> the only cause; it would have been possible for me to contribute at least a
>> little. The reason I did not was that participating in the development had
>> been too emotionally draining to endure. In my experience LilyPond has
>> (used to have?) huge inertia (disproportionate to the size of the project).
>> I mean (more or less, please consider this to be an approximation) that
>> when I tried doing things that didn't clearly align with the views of a
>> person with most authority (for the last few years David has been this
>> person) I had felt *unwelcome* and my personal impression was that they
>> were "blocked". It was very difficult to get some things done.
>
> You seem to be impatient.  In late 2011 LilyPond broke my renaissance
> scores (with a fix that uncovered decade old latent bugs --
> assumptions that were false since long, though probably true when the
> code was first written), and to get them right took me a _year_ of
> issues, reviews, reversions, misunderstandings, messing up the
> submission process and my breaking other people's scores several times
> (to get just a glimpse, take a look at issue 2783).  I thought that my
> patches were obviously trivial bug fixes, but to keep LilyPond
> operational, I (or rather, we, with David and Keith) had to think
> about the design, not only particular lines of code.  When my last
> commit reached master in late 2012, it was quite different (and far
> better) than when I first submitted it.  and the process taught me
> that David is arguable and well worth respecting.

Arguable and well worth respecting does not really help with regard to
the cost in emotional energy contributing has.  If the summary
impression is "David makes contributing to LilyPond a hair-pulling
nightmare but...", then for most people reading on after the "but" is
only worth their trouble if they are in a hair-pulling nightmare already
and need to get out of it.

So one proposal I read out of Janek's response that my output needs to
be throttled where discussions are involved and that I should likely
make it a habit not to respond to the same discussion thread more than,
say, twice daily and then in a summary response.

>> Since David has more time available that many of us (who have a
>> non-LilyPond job), and apparently limiting email volume is not a high
>> priority for him.
>
> I'd describe this as David taking great pains to express himself
> unambiguously, knowing well the communication problems.

That's a gracious way of putting it.  Another may be that I have
problems understanding or accepting that given the same premise and/or
data, people arrive at different conclusions.

> Contributing to LilyPond is hard, because it's a complex piece of
> software with a long and complex history; people most interested in it
> are musicians.

And there is a danger that they have too little time for being a
musician left once they immerse themselves into being a LilyPond
developer.  A number of contributors are restrained in their ability to
be a musician by having a day job; LilyPond may help them in their free
time working with music.  So it's not unusual for contributors to have
little overall time available.  And if the day job is already
emotionally draining, the hobby should probably not do the same.

So I get the problem but am obviously not overly successful at tackling
it.

-- 
David Kastrup