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Re: The hel-arabic.ly file story...


From: Karlin High
Subject: Re: The hel-arabic.ly file story...
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2022 14:17:01 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.9.0

On 12/28/2022 10:17 AM, Amir Czwink wrote:
new contributions with (I'm sorry but thats the truth)
bad quality over proven ones, that have been existing since 2008 at
least, have been included into lilypond without questioning its
purpose

Producing sheet music for music traditions outside of LilyPond's focus is only possible thanks to the efforts of contributors from those traditions.

There are a certain number of active followers for LilyPond community discussion on its email lists, the code review process, and so on.

I am unclear on how many people with skill in Arabic music are in that number. I was not aware of your work, having only started following the email lists in 2016 or so.

I know nothing about Arabic music, other than it seems to have more notes per octave than what is used in music traditions descended from Western Europe.

The only comments I have are about how to keep the "proven" contributions prioritized over the "bad quality" ones.

Any time changes are proposed in a specialized area, it may be that the specialist proposing it does not have views representative of all other people in the specialty.

I think the LilyPond community then has 2 choices:

(1) Take the specialist's proposal at face value, beyond obvious and immediate problems

As you say, "one developer decided to contribute his ideas and nobody
questioned that in the code review." Perhaps because nobody else involved knew what questions to ask?

(2) Make the specialist's contribution wait for acceptance until another suitable and unrelated expert can be found to review it.

"Looks good, but this patch will have to wait until we find someone else to review it, who isn't your colleage, but is still well-versed in Tuvan Throat Singing from past centuries in Mongolia."

I remember seeing a similar thing in past discussion on note heads for shaped-note music traditions. A fine-details feature request was being asserted as highly important, while I'd somehow spent my entire life in said music tradition without even knowing the details in question existed, and was unable to find them when I started looking for them.

<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2020-07/msg00229.html>

The fine details of mirrored-MI notes are possibly gone now.

Because, all the community had to go on was, "in the past, an expert said it needs to be that way."

There were apparently few lasting references given to establish that the claimed feature was representative of the entire music tradition in question. When future contributors get to looking, and can't substantiate the claim, it may well be disregarded if that expert is not around to defend it.

The better we can document the reasons behind a change in community discussions related to them, the better chances there are of future changes deferring to the past discussions.

I commend you for submitting a merge request to improve LilyPond's quality for Arabic music as you see it needs.
--
Karlin High
Missouri, USA



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