Op woensdag 11-11-2009 om 20:08 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef David Kastrup:
> > As we both (all) know, there IS a "reasonable way to become an expert" > > at Lilypond > > No. A _reasonable_ way to become an expert is by reading into > increasingly more expert-level documentation and working with it. > > "Humanly possible" is not the same as "reasonable". "Reasonable" > entails a collective effort not to repeat avoidable work and > frustration. Being able to maintain this pov "would be nice". However, how do you suggest we get there? It may well be that you are helping with the first steps right now: identification of the problem. The thing with open source/ LilyPond is: someone needs to follow up and do the work to get from Humanly possible to Reasonable. Until now, that has not been done yet. And my question would be: is it worth it? Several times we have seen people sending perfect patches or code right out of the blue, without asking any questions. Simon Tatham with his Gonville font being the latest instance I remember. This falls in the category of Humanly possible. Possibly harsh and not enough for some potential contributors. The good thing is: it did not cost us any resources. Also seen several times are people sending /lots/ of questions, be it users or developers, and after everything has been answered, the user quits or potential developers says she has no time or does not thing she is up for it after all. While I do not have a final verdict on this, it seems safe to spend most of our development efforts on developing. You need to be pretty good to add something to LilyPond and I doubt if developer documentation/hand-holding is going to make that any easier. > I can't improve what I can't see or understand. Can you change what you see and then look what happened? > The topic was why people find Lilypond too cumbersome to use. I gave > reasons, and the reaction "please change it yourself" is not addressing > the topic at all. It also delivers the impression that the current > state is basically my fault and responsibility, and nothing needs to be > done about it that I don't do myself. Apparently, making this Reasonable is something you consider to be important. The thing to do here would be to pick up that task -- if it's important enough for you. It is next to impossible to get people to do what you want by merely stating that it is important. Several months ago I tried to coax people to help with the website and look into SEO ["Do we have the best search terms that will bring new users/developers in?"]. I argued that most of our potential users/developers by far (>99%) never heard of LilyPond yet and I figured that good findability/visibility and attractiveness of the website were probably of utmost importance. Well, have you read some of Graham's cries for help? Noone cares. Greetings, Jan. -- Jan Nieuwenhuizen <jann...@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter AvatarĀ®: http://AvatarAcademy.nl | http://lilypond.org _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user