Dear LyXers,
today I was very angry in a discussion as never before and cooled down a bit meanwhile. To avoid hat
this happen again there are some points that I want to bring to the list because this affects more
and more discussions.
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At first it is important for me that a discussion works as follows:
1. somebody starts with an argument
2. the next one brings his argument and replies to the argument of the first one
This way we can shorten many discussions and avoid unnecessary conflicts. In the past we were more
and more only concentrating on our own arguments but do not reply to the existing arguments.
For today's heated discussion about changing some shortcuts I introduced the argument that some
shortcuts are in general treated as unsafe by some Windows guru and I linked another case where
these shortcuts made problems. I expected to hear why one thinks we should nevertheless use these
shortcuts.
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My second point is that many of us are no native speakers and can therefore not always express
ourselves in the right tone. For example for the English expression "I tend to" I can use in German
"ich befürworte" or "ich tendiere dazu" or "ich ziehe in Betracht" or "ich erwäge" or "ich kann mir
vorstellen". So misunderstandings are something we cannot always avoid. But we all should trust each
other that each of us is interested to boost the acceptance of LyX in the world and not to fork it
or any else strange things.
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I often got the feeling that the word of a developer does not count as much as the word of a user.
For example when I see a potential bug I want to fix it before others can suffer from it (no matter
if that would only affect 1 of 10000 users). But when I come up with such an issue I often hear that
it is only on my system and I should rather fix it that changing LyX. First if we get the first 3
user complaints the problem is approved as real. That is not fair. As a maintainer one of course
tries to fix all potential issues before they become public.
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We should accept that not everybody of us can do everything and has the same ability. For example I
very much appreciate the input of our translators because they think different than I do since they
are only users. Some of us are experts in the compiler business, some are experts in dependencies
like boost or Python etc. This diversity is what makes us strong! We should therefore not expect
everybody to dive deep into every field but help him in fields he is no expert. For example I have a
very limited spare time and even had to break LyX development recently for some months due to lack
of time. I can therefore only focus on some special work. The compiler and Git things are not my
working field and as I only need to change there something once a year I will forget what I learned
anyway sooner or later. That is not bad will but a consequence that I am not a student anymore. At
the university I could read and write private mails from my PC, this is of course not possible when
you are working in a company. So I can only do some LyX work after often tiring 10 hour work days
where I don't have anything to do with software and programming.
many thanks for your attention and best regards
Uwe
