On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 10:10:32AM -0500, Tim McNamara wrote: > > On May 23, 2009, at 6:34 AM, Graham Percival wrote: > >> My goal is not to insult you into feeling bad; my goal is >> to insult you into HELPING US FIX THINGS. Learn scheme. Join the >> Frogs. Contribute to lilypond. If everybody sits around saying >> "why doesn't somebody fix this", then it WILL NEVER BE FIXED. > > "Helping" takes many forms.
Given that I've spent approximately 3000 hours working on lilypond without touching code, I know. > Like many LilyPond users, I know nothing useful about computer > programming and so cannot help with correcting problems in the code. I > have a full time-plus highly demanding job, a marriage, a house, ailing > parents, I play music and have other hobbies. So do most of the developers. Look here, this wasn't a user saying "hey, I find this confusing" on the -user mailist. This wasn't somebody saying "it's a shame this bug still exists". Xavier "allowed [himself]" to "bump" a message to lilypond-devel to tell us that nobody's fixed his particular favorite bug yet. He has an "expectation to see this issue fixed". What's more, he realized that the message "looks a bit offensive". To many developers, this messages translates like this: HEY, YOU LOSERS! I DEMAND THAT YOU IGNORE YOUR JOBS, FAMILIES, AND THE 400 OTHER BUGS THAT YOU ALREADY KNOW ABOUT, AND WORK ON THE BUG THAT I WANT FIXED. This is both rude and stupid. Rude, because it's making demands when one has no right to make demands. Stupid, because it's counter-productive. When people start making demands out of what I do in my free time, I feel *less* inclined to do work for them, not more. > Using LilyPond and providing feedback from the "naive user" perspective > is helpful, That's not what he was doing. > The documentation is at times difficult and opaque. It is the > newbies and non-programmers who will tend to remind us of this > fact. I'd like to publicly thank you for all the effort you spent improving the documentation during our year-long "Grand Documentation Project", where I bent over backwards organizing people to discuss and contribute to the docs. ... I'd _like_ to thank you, but it didn't turn out that way. Maybe you'd like to be involved -- at least in providing comments -- the next time I organize such a project? (if you don't believe my comments about GDP, please look at the mailist archives to see the occasional discussions, and the many many times I spent begging people to read the updated docs and give comments. It was _very_ frustrating for new doc contributors to spend 50 hours rewriting a chapter, and then receive absolutely no feedback about their efforts from the community) > Telling them that they have no right to comment is not helpful because > the project loses their insights and may lose them as users. They can comment. If they complain, I'll complain back. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
