Re: minimal examples

[Hans Aberg]

On 7 Dec 2007, at 12:20, Valentin Villenave wrote:

> The point is: we do *not* have enough people to handle all this (so
> this is a very different situation from other places you've been used
> to). LilyPond is:
> - a huge project
> - a large community
> - a very small development team, with only volunteers that have "real"
> lifes, "real" jobs and therefore are often unable to deal with the
> bugs.
>
> By narrowing the problem, you help soving it, you can save the
> developers some precious time. An example: consider a developer who
> has only two hours left. If he's only dealing with "minimal" snippets
> could probably solve, say, 15 bugs, whereas if the snippets are large,
> require him to do some tests, trials etc he could solve only 5 bugs or
> less...

The problem is that a user which does not know anything about actual  
LilyPond debugging is in a rather poor position doing the actual  
reduction you want to see unless you tell how. This is normal in bug  
reporting. I think you need to have at least one developer accessible  
to have a look at the bug reports before filing; this way others will  
learn, and the long term developer effort will be reduced.

> All the bug reporting process is described on
> http://lilypond.org/web/devel/participating/bugs
> Granted, it's not very easy to find, but it does exist.

If you want people to follow this, simplify it as much as possible.  
For example, it would be good if you could make sure the "\paper 
{ ragged-right=##t }" is not needed, somehow (a default in  
LilyPond?). Things that users can't understand why it should be  
there, no matter how useful it is to developers, is likely to drop  
out anyway in the user's bug reports.

  Hans Åberg