Re: it's all up to you users (was: Please forget LM MG NR IR SL AU)

[Valentin Villenave]

2008/8/18 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:

> That seems trivial -- surely everybody knows this already -- so
> let's discuss a specific example.  I'll pick on Valentin since he
> won't mind... and also since he's almost a complete opposite of
> me.

Please do not think of me as a yes-man :-)

(If anything, I'm the kind of guy who can't even say "yes" to the
"no-man", if you follow me...)

> He offered to do NR 1.8 Text last Jan or Feb.  It's still not
> finished.  text.itely would be a 5-hour job for me, so I figured
> 10 hours for GDP helpers.  Granted, he's working on a foreign
> language.  If I had to write text.itely in French, it would
> probably take me double the time -- *only* double, despite my very
> poor French, since most of the docs are in examples anyway.

Well, although I didn't think it would be so hard, let's face it: I
just suck at writing documentation. (see below)

> GDP is ending with a half-finished NR 1.8.  It's also ending with
> a half-finished NR 1.6; Text isn't the only unfinished "main
> notation" section.  Lots of users don't read the mailists; they'll
> just see these unfinished doc sections.  For the sake of argument,
> suppose that Valentin could have finished NR 1.8 if he had only
> answered half the emails that he did.  Wouldn't that be a good
> trade-off?

I don't think everybody is as reasonable and pragmatic as you are. I'm
the complete opposite of you, remember?

As you mentioned, I'm concerned about the "general well-being of the
project"; in Free Software projects, there are people like you, who
try to spend their time the most efficient way, and there are people
like me, who are mainly here for selfish reasons: to have fun, to make
silly little things, to launch some ideas no matter how crazy they
are... We have to take this kind of contributors into account *too*,
no matter how unefficient and unreliable they can be on a short or
long-term perspective.

For the past couple of weeks, I may have been spending a couple hours
a *day* working on NR1.8, in addition to my daily opera work and
LilyPond maintaining. And yet, I am not nearly finished, as you
pointed out. So, I kinda *need* to answer silly mails on -user or work
on harp pedal diagrams every now and then.

> If we had more people in the doc team, then I wouldn't have
> discouraged Carl from doing programming -- we could have people
> moving from advanced docs to bugfixing without putting the doc
> team in danger.

You are absolutely right -- as far as you're dealing with "serious"
people in a "serious" world. If some geeks are here "for fun", all you
can do is to make it cool: if they have fun at fixing bugs or
implementing features (or doing webdesign or drawing comics or
whatever they like), then you have to use that as a carrot.

> I was really hoping that this "it's all up to you users" would
> reduce the 1 in 20 figure as well, but given the complete lack of
> users saying "you've made some good points.  Sign me up to be on
> the Fuzziness Force.  I can't answer a lot of questions, but if I
> see any question that I *can* answer, I'll do it", I'm not
> optimistic.

That is actually what led me to start the LilyReport in the first
place. We have to show that working on LilyPond is *fun*, that our
community is *nice*, etc. Your "it's all up to you" would (will) gain
much visibility, featured in a Report issue.

Oh, and just in case anyone wonders, I do not have given up with the
LilyReport either; I'm actually preparing something new and better for
September.

Cheers,
Valentin