Adrian, I am trying to make suggestions to make Ragel more accessible to people new to it. There is no need to shoot the messenger. If I am saying it, then some other people are probably thinking it.
Re: ""please move the project hosting somewhere else because it would be more convenient for me."" -- that is not what I said, nor how I said it, nor does it capture my intent. You can see that, I hope, in my original private email to you. I'm just trying to offer suggestions that will help. Yes, they might help me, but they will also increase participation. Github and Bitbucket reduce barriers to collaboration. The stone age did not end because we ran out of stone. These tools are simply better than mailing lists for particular use cases. For the other use cases you still can use the mailing list! Ragel would benefit from these features: wiki pages, bug tracking, easy forking, code comments, and more. I respect your personal decision to disagree -- I could be wrong! -- however, I think the community is likely missing out, so I do not think it should "just" be a matter of "personal preference". It should be a question of what serves the community the best. The beauty of this is that it is not hard. It is not either/or. You can try Github without forcing people to use it and see what happens. -- In my experience reading a diff is quick -- even a large one. So, I still have a hard time seeing how scanning the diff is all that time consuming. Boring, perhaps, but not really that time intensive. I spent an hour or two reading and copy-editing the manual, so I didn't think it was wrong to ask for you to review the diff. Maybe it would take 10 minutes? Re: "extraneous whitespace modifications" -- it is second nature to me to use word wrapping as I edit. Since I read over the entire manual I figured it was much faster to do the word wrapping and editing at the same time. Does it really matter that I cleaned up the whitespace and fixed typos in the one patch rather than two? In either case you will need to review the docs, right? To be direct, is this more about making the documentation better -- or more about having it done the way you prefer it? We could continue down the path of "whose time is more valuable" but that doesn't make the docs better. -- I said "reality distortion field because I said "here is a bug" and your response was "don't do that" without admitting that it was a bug. Look, I found a work-around, so it wasn't a big deal. And I don't expect it to be fixed right away --- or ever. But it is a bug, best I can tell. My goal in sharing it publicly was to confirm or deny it -- and share it on the record for others. -- I also said "reality distortion field" because I'm not sure if the experts here can relate / remember what it was like to learn Ragel in the first place. It is difficult. It is easy (and reasonable, perhaps) to point a newbie to the manual. We should be willing to ask ourselves if there is a better way. Finding good, simple examples to learn Ragel is still hard. When I ask to see if there are example and get pointed to the manual that I've already read multiple times, that doesn't advance the conversation. I would suggest asking a question: "have you looked at section X?" works better than "the answer is in section X". The former suggests an open-mindedness -- a willingness to admit that the manual and documentation can be improved -- and invites the community to improve it together. If I thought Ragel was "just too hard for mortals" and was beyond explanation -- which, unfortunately does come across in some write ups -- or if I thought Ragel was "peachy just as it is" and already had all the documentation needed, then I would not be writing this email. Anyhow, as I've said before, I will try to share code examples and problems that I find along the way. That said, I will have less motivation to share if the community tone is not friendly. That matters a lot to me. -David On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Adrian Thurston <[email protected]> wrote: > > Well possibly it should be prohibited, but there are all kind of other bad > things that can be done with ragel and the answer is usually "don't do the > bad thing". Consequently, I don't spend too much time working on those kinds > of issues. If you would like to work on it you're welcome to. > >> I'm going roughly 0 for 4 on the mailing list. I'm a new user trying >> to get feedback here -- and there seems to be a sort of reality >> distortion field going on. I have not had this experience on other >> open source projects. > > 1. Don't submit patches with extraneous whitespace modifications and expect > the maintainer to sort it out. > > 2. Don't make your opening suggestion "please move the project hosting > somewhere else because it would be more convenient for me." > > -Adrian _______________________________________________ ragel-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.complang.org/mailman/listinfo/ragel-users
