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

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 28/12/2022 à 23:09, Werner LEMBERG a écrit :
> Exactly.  We are *not* experts for music from Arabia/Turkey/Iran.  We
> take what we get.  It was our mistake then to not asking you or other
> guys for for an expert opinion – this time I've directly contacted
> Hassan for comments on your MR (hopefully his e-mail address is still
> valid).



Our having few experts of Arabic music around is definitely the main
problem(and no, in spite of bearing the name أبو سمرا, I'm not
knowledgeable about Arabic music theory).

Judging from the comments written in French in hel-arabic.ly, my impression
is that the patch author thought his personal file would be useful for
LilyPond but without really realizing the expectations from a contribution,
James picked it up as we was helping with getting patches from unexperienced
people through the contribution process although not a developer
himself, and nobody really tried to compare it to arabic.ly because
nobody felt qualified on Arabic music.

However, I would like to point out that even as people with zero
experience in Arabic music , we do have a simple way to assess whether
a contribution looks good. I mean the commit message.

Suppose I see an MR improving support for a type of music I know nothing
about (say: Arabic music), and the commit message reads like this, where
'blabla' stands for stuff I don't understand:

  Add blabla style support to arabic.ly

  Previously, the only supported blabla style was blabla, which
  is the most common style in blabla.  However, for blabla music
  from blabla, a different style is used, where blabla. This allows
  using this style by setting the property blabla. The data blabla
  was filled according to the reference book blabla by blabla
  (page 42), which is the closest to a standard that exists.
  Note that this necessitates the change blabla to blabla
  because blabla. In theory, this also affects the default style;
  however, users of the default style should not notice it because
  it only affects the situation where blabla, which does not make
  musical sense because blabla.

Reading this, even with no understanding of the 'blabla' parts, I
am confident that the change is well thought through. As a reviewer,
I will check the idioms used, but I will trust the author on the big
picture.

This should take under 5 minutes to write for the patch author,
if indeed they understand what they are doing -- and if they don't
understand what they're doing and nobody else does, the change
should not be accepted!

Bottom line: in such cases, we can and should ask the patch
author to provide details on what the patch does.

Best,
Jean

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