Le 21 nov. 2022 à 16:53, Luca Fascione <l.fasci...@gmail.com> a
écrit :
On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 2:06 PM Werner LEMBERG <[1]w...@gnu.org> wrote:
The thing is: Something might happen if I'm not available, for
whatever reasons. It definitely *is* a high maintenance cost if a
single developer is responsible...
But that's true of any one feature: I build you a nice template library
to do <whatever> in <whatever situation>
and you find a bug while I'm <on vacation>. That can always happen, we
know this, we cope with it.
How's the TeX/texinfo build any different?
> And to what Wols said: I agree completely, it should be _all_
about
> the users, coding is an act of service, not self-gratification.
The
> joy comes from making (other) humans happy, not compilers...
I disagree, it is *not* all about the users. There must be a
balance
between what the developers want to do or can do, and what the users
expect. Promising stuff to the user, which later on fails due to
the
lack of developer resources, is bad.
Forgive me Werner, but it appears to me your own closing point is
actually precisely about the users, isn't it?
If I may paraphrase what I hear you say: "The users are being
disserviced (is that a word?) thereby this is bad". I agree, of course.
This IS bad.
The users are being provided with an unsatisfactory experience, and
that is undesirable.
And it seems to me you're concerned in the same way as I am: our
role here is in service of a community that engraves music sheets.
When we stop these people, impede their progress, make their planning
invalid
(possibly because we're not delivering to what we promised), we are
behaving poorly to them. I share that concern, and I think it's a very
ethically
sound concern to have, it's an important thing to worry about, I'd say.
I'd characterize it as a user-focused concern, no?
I think we are losing sight of the question at hand. The origin of this
“users vs developers” debate is that Wols criticized me for seemingly
minimizing the importance of typography for my own reading experience
of the manual compared to maintenance tasks I might personally need to
work on (or that is how I understood it). To which I replied that I am
not minimizing the importance of typography for myself when I read the
manual, but its importance for all users, compared to availability of
the documentation for all users and other work that developers are able
to do for the benefit of all users if their maintenance burden
decreases.
Jean
References
1. mailto:w...@gnu.org
