user vs. user (was: User vs Developer: Round 2 (and half-time?) (was: Re: music font)
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 01:50:13AM +0100, Janek Warchoł wrote: 2012/1/23 Xavier Scheuer x.sche...@gmail.com: why I never *demand* developers to fix an issue, even if it is one that is really annoying my ego in almost every score I typeset. One thing comes to my mind: you are talking about bugs that annoy many people, and they waste a lot of your own time. Have you considered organizing a collective bounty to fix that bug? We now have a webpage for this: http://lilypond.org/sponsoring.html My main goal was to attract attention to Emilio's nice project of music font with LilyPond. I attracted Graham's attention on me instead. Well, you asked for Graham's attention when you cc'd him. I think cc'ing him was a mistake, Me, and a bunch of other long-time developers. I'd have probably ignored the email if he hadn't done this. bitten by the red ants' queen! That's not a surprise. Graham's sensitivity is well-known, especially in this context. Yes, because it annoys me when people complain at the wrong target. Xavier mentioned having to submit a bug report 3 times because the emails kept on being lost/forgotten. That is indeed a serious problem -- but wait, that's a problem with users, not developers! The bug squad is composed (mainly) of users. It needs no technical skill, no git access, nothing like that. All it needs is people who can use email and a web browser and are willing to spend 20 minutes each week. Let's take a look at the current statistics, shall we? http://lilypond.org/~graham/maybe-missing-emails.html [from 2011 Dec 01 to 2012 Jan 24] Response category Number Percent of total Less than 24 hours 50 68.49% 24 to 48 hours 6 8.22% More than 48 hours 8 10.96% Never replied 9 12.33% Those numbers aren't great. Maybe Xavier could find 20 minutes each week to help improve them? hmm, looking at the never replied emails, I'd say that 3 were not actually bug reports. So things aren't quite as bad as those numbers suggest. Also, if we look at the later statistics, we see that of the 8 emails that were responded to later than 48 hours, 5 were done by Phil Holmes (who does bug squad on Sunday), 2 were done by Ralph Palmer, and 1 was done by Mark Klein. If we had somebody who was willing to seriously deal with emails that had gotten forgotten on Wednesdays and Thursdays (i.e. half a week away from Sunday), then we might be able to reliably respond to missing bug reports within 96 hours! Of course, a 96-hour reponse rate isn't precisely fantastic, but it's a start. - Graham ___ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
Re: user vs. user (was: User vs Developer: Round 2 (and half-time?)(was: Re: music font)
- Original Message - From: Graham Percival gra...@percival-music.ca To: Janek Warchoł janek.lilyp...@gmail.com Cc: lilypond-devel@gnu.org; lilypond-user lilypond-u...@gnu.org Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 11:57 AM Subject: user vs. user (was: User vs Developer: Round 2 (and half-time?)(was: Re: music font) Let's take a look at the current statistics, shall we? http://lilypond.org/~graham/maybe-missing-emails.html [from 2011 Dec 01 to 2012 Jan 24] Response category Number Percent of total Less than 24 hours 50 68.49% 24 to 48 hours6 8.22% More than 48 hours 8 10.96% Never replied 9 12.33% FWIW, the script isn't always correct - some replies seem to get missed in the mail download. I spent a few minutes looking at this earlier but couldn't work out why. Anyway, let's look at the missed ones: Issue 1377 should be pushed now? 10 Dec I replied I see James has now said it won't patch master, and so is back to needs work Beam subdivision bug in 2.15.22 Xavier replied same day, Carl followed up. hot potato bug handling I replied 18 Dec error: auto beaming in tuplets after dotted semiquaver Carl replied same day Engravers cannot be added at the StaffGroup level Janek replied same day PianoStaff, time and grace duplicates the time display Xavier replied same day Reorganize NR 1.3 Expressive marks Fair cop - it was addressed directly to James, though make doc-stage-1 barfs Julien replied same day. wrong beamlet direction in 6/8 and 3/4 measure for dotted quaver and semiquavers Janek replied same day; Carl followed up. We may need to add Janek and Xavier to the list of associates. Of course, a 96-hour reponse rate isn't precisely fantastic, but it's a start. Well - TBH time isn't of the essence as a general rule. Whether a bug gets added to the tracker in one day or 3 rarely affects the overall development. -- Phil Holmes ___ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
Re: user vs. user (was: User vs Developer: Round 2 (and half-time?)(was: Re: music font)
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 12:27:56PM -, Phil Holmes wrote: Of course, a 96-hour reponse rate isn't precisely fantastic, but it's a start. Well - TBH time isn't of the essence as a general rule. Whether a bug gets added to the tracker in one day or 3 rarely affects the overall development. Our published materials says 24 hours: http://lilypond.org/bug-reports.html (step 4: wait for a response) If the norm is 72 hours, or 96, or 168 hours, we should update that accordingly. I don't mind what the number is, just as long as we give users an honest appraisal of how long they should wait. IMO taking a 95% cutoff is reasonable -- i.e. if 95% of emails are replied to within 80 hours, let's publish please allow up to 80 hours. - Graham ___ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
Re: user vs. user (was: User vs Developer: Round 2 (and half-time?)(was: Re: music font)
2012/1/24 Graham Percival gra...@percival-music.ca: Our published materials says 24 hours: [...] we should update that accordingly. http://codereview.appspot.com/5575047/ and stop worrying. :) ___ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
Re: User vs Developer: Round 2 (and half-time?) (was: Re: music font)
Dear Xavier, hereby i'd like to thank you for your time spent on helping LilyPond! It's true that user's work often is not appreciated enough. 2012/1/23 Xavier Scheuer x.sche...@gmail.com: Dear Graham, dear Developers, why I never *demand* developers to fix an issue, even if it is one that is really annoying my ego in almost every score I typeset. Sometimes when an issue has been unfixed for years and when I see people often being troubled by this issue I post a message stating it and thus moving this issue from the bottom of the pile. One thing comes to my mind: you are talking about bugs that annoy many people, and they waste a lot of your own time. Have you considered organizing a collective bounty to fix that bug? If i remember correctly, David is interested in working on Lily for money; there may be others. If you find 20 people annoyed by a bug and each one gives 10$, that's something! For example i'm interested in sponsoring bugfixes and new features, but there's no way i can afford to hire someone myself (200-500$? i'm a student!). But i'm definately interested in giving 10$ for each of the bugs that affect my Lily workflow. My main goal was to attract attention to Emilio's nice project of music font with LilyPond. I attracted Graham's attention on me instead. Well, you asked for Graham's attention when you cc'd him. I think cc'ing him was a mistake, because: - his function as administrator means that he won't do stuff like this (help someone with music font) - he clearly declared that he won't even try to talk other people into doing anything. Thus, no point in cc'ing Graham - expect for being bitten by the red ants' queen! That's not a surprise. Graham's sensitivity is well-known, especially in this context. I know that you didn't want to offend Graham (i wouldn't be offended if i were on Graham's place), but nevertheless Graham felt offended. The only thing we can do about it is to write e-mails in a way that not only seems polite to us, but also will be received as polite by Graham (or whoever the recipient is) - it's hard, i know. (actually i think things would be easier for Graham if he were less sensitive, but it's his choice and he can do whatever he likes - even if it's difficult for us) Recently i seriously offended David without intentions to do so at all - it was also a miscommunication :( cheers, Janek ___ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
User vs Developer: Round 2 (and half-time?) (was: Re: music font)
This is a split reply from the thread music font. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2012-01/msg00752.html The title is a reference to the fist Users versus developers flame war of which I appear to be also at the origin. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2009-05/msg00551.html Dear Graham, dear Developers, On 22 January 2012 00:35, Graham Percival gra...@percival-music.ca wrote: And I'm a bit disappointed that you keep on whining about developers not doing what you want them to do. Argh, bitten by the red ants' queen! I guess I asked for it. I am not your slave. The fact that I have volunteered thousands of hours working on lilypond does not make me your slave. I am really sorry if I have hurt some of you, that was not my intention. I did not crawl out of my mother's womb knowing about lilypond internals, or even about programming at all. Any knowledge I have was from hard work: reading source code, reading public emails on the list archives, and learning about programming in general. I am a bit dissapointed that *you* have not done that. Please do not consider users as under men. We use LilyPond—probably more often than some developers—and hence are fully aware of its strengths, but also of its missing features, most annoying bugs, etc. Yes I am a simple user, not developing, programming and doing all this hard work. I admit I have currently higher priorities than learning Scheme, C++, etc. I *use* LilyPond, I try to help in a certain way (see below), I promote LilyPond around me and make scores for my university orchestra using LilyPond. I do not pretend to the title of Lead Developer, Release Meister or whatever. If we report issues, regressions and make new features requests, it is not simply because we wallow in keep on whining or because we take a sadistic pleasure in giving some more work to the developers. I use LilyPond quite often, I try to help users both on the French users mailing list and on the international one. I report bugs, regressions, make new feature request, both from my experience with LilyPond and making the link between Developers/Users from the international lists and French Users on lilypond-user-fr (by announcing in French new features, fixed issues, important ongoing discussions French user might be concerned about, but also in the reverse way, by transmitting upstream issues discovered by French users or popular requests in the French users community). Yesterday I posted several messages on different LilyPond mailing lists. I replied to some users' questions/issues, I reported a regression bug type-critical and… I started a fight with Graham! I received at the same time thanks you from users (in English and French) and infuriation from devel. I received also acknowledgements and congratulations about the quality of the score I made with LilyPond from musicians of my orchestra. You want something done? Do it yourself. That's what open source means -- you have the legal right to do it yourself. It does not mean that other people are obligated to do it for you. I understand LilyPond is an open source project, lead by volunteers. That's why I do not complaint when I have to send by three times a bug report because it was first lost/forgotten, why I never *demand* developers to fix an issue, even if it is one that is really annoying my ego in almost every score I typeset. Sometimes when an issue has been unfixed for years and when I see people often being troubled by this issue I post a message stating it and thus moving this issue from the bottom of the pile. And sometimes a kind developer see this issue and start fixing it! :-) You have la liberté, not royauté. Users usually never get any kind of acknowledgements or sign of gratitude from developers for volunteering [also] few hours trying to help other users, reporting back issues/requests, trying to make the link between high skilled developers and lambda user. I expressed my deep feelings. Yes I was disappointed, like when I see a reply like a RTFM smack in the face of a new user, or as a no as only-argument answer to a request/suggestion. My main goal was to attract attention to Emilio's nice project of music font with LilyPond. I attracted Graham's attention on me instead. I guess my message was as much discouraging (or even more) as being told each time you make a suggestion You want something done? Do it yourself. Learn programming!. I do not want to fight with some developers. I think we all have the same objective: to improve LilyPond. And each one has its own way to contribute, at different levels and different implications. I would be delighted to offer our finest Belgian beer to LilyPond developers which I could meet at FOSDEM 2012. I am afraid my student budget does not allow me to pay developers to work full time on LilyPond. Cheers, Whining Xavier -- Xavier Scheuer x.sche...@gmail.com
