Han-Wen Nienhuys <[email protected]> writes: > On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 8:19 AM, David Kastrup <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I have my doubts that Lilypond can develop into a sustainable project >> from the current state of core mind and code. Projects like the frogs >> are nice for recruiting people, but if they are locked out of engagedly >> working with parts of the core for technical and social reasons, this is >> ultimately going nowhere new. >> >> New people can't pick up the slack if they are not shown the ropes. >> Those that do the heavy lifting, not the whips. > > You currently have 5 commits in the master tree, a few one-liners and > the largest touching about 50 lines.
And several dozen mostly exasperated mails on the developer list, posted patches, including on Rietveld as demanded. All those reflect much more time investment than what is actually accepted or even commented on. > Why don't you try getting smaller patches -whose effects you can > oversee- in first before trying to radically change core system? Because the stuff which I need Lilypond for requires me to work with more parts than those which I presumably are supposed to touch. Since the parts are largely undocumented and questions about them are mostly ignored or met with derision or even misleading information from those who have already worked with the code, I am dependent on understanding the code. Where the code does things with a complexity without explaining the reasons, and with its developers refusing to comment on the reasons, there is not much that I can do except trying to simplify it to the degree where I can hope to work with it. > There is a lot of subtlety and a lot of history behind the way things > are now, Subtlety is a bad thing in software. A really bad thing. And history is usually also a history of dead ends and failed attempts. Both _need_ to get documented in order to keep history from running in circles. Culture is the passing on of knowledge, keeping others from having to reinvent wheels. Progress means standing on the shoulders of giants. That is not possible if they run away. If I have to invest the same time into Lilypond as you did to arrive at the same point, there is no point in working with you. > and I don't have the time to explain them to the level of detail you > seem to need for being productive. Most of the questions I asked would be answered in 10 lines or less. I have invested by now several workdays in getting answers to the questions a) Where are artificial, where technical, and where logical implementation borders between grob properties and context properties and their accessors? b) What is the toplevel module manipulation in markup-init.ly trying to achieve and why? Both can be likely answered in 10 lines or less by those who actually wrote the code or participated in its previous discussion. With b) I am currently at the point where it appears that the markup-init.ly stuff tries exporting definitions one level upwards of, well, the top-level. The code does not contain any comments, there is no explanation of why a propagation beyond the top-level is necessary, the checkin does not contain any history (it is just a one-time checkin), the crashes this is supposed to avoid judging from the developer list discussion at the time of the checkin in 12/2006 are not repeatable on my system, after everybody yelled at me that contributions would not be manageable without putting them up, I placed the work on the syntax at <URL:http://codereview.appspot.com/160048/show> where a single person (AFAIU not one that would be comfortable judging its technical merits) reviewed it and commented on a trivial documentation problem. Appreciated, but not in the same league as the many admonishments I got for following the "proper" procedures. In particular since this was not done by one of those clamoring for me to follow the rules. At some point of time, when you are trying to make a new horse do tricks, you need to have _some_ kind of reward rather than letting matters just drop again. Undocumented code is not maintainable. Throwing it out is a matter of sanity if it can't get documented, and it apparently can't. It apparently can't even get questioned or discussed. How do you suppose that getting new core developers is going to work? -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
