On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 01:48:54PM +0200, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote: > On 14/05/12 11:41, David Kastrup wrote: > > > > Before saying anything more, I'm sorry if my earlier email was > offensive or intemperate; it wasn't meant to be.
Ditto. > I was writing out of concern for the ease of contributing to > LilyPond (more on that in a moment). I agree that it's harder to contribute than it should be. However, I am confident in stating that the summary for experienced developers is the best we can offer new (experienced) contributors given our current system and the amount of time+effort+interest the current developers have in mentoring new people. It's not ideal, but it's the best compromise I can find. > If I understand correctly, Rietveld is a server-side app. My > objection isn't to Rietveld per se, but to the requirement to use a > custom app on my system to get my code _into_ Rietveld. This seems > to be Rietveld's fault, so I'm sorry if it seemed like I was > apportioning blame to the LP team. You can upload to rietveld without our custom app (but using a different one); I think you can even upload without any app at all. The reason we push our own git-cl (custom app) is that this keeps track of patches for us. Before we started using it, we lost approximately 10-20% of patches. "lost" as in "hey guys, I sent a patch three months ago, has anybody looked at it?". Or even sadder, not having any follow-up at at all and completely losing that work. Of course, even in the "three-month inquiry" case, it sometimes still led to completely losing that work because git master had changed sufficiently that there were many conflicts (or else the patch just didn't make sense any more given the changed architecture). If you think that's a horrific record, then I quite agree. If you think that somebody should take responsibility for new contributors / new patches... well, that would be nice, but that's historically been lacking in lilypond. Best compromise? put the onus on patch submitters to submit with our special tool, which at least ensures that we won't lost their patch. Assuming that our current amount of interest in new patches stays constant, I am certain that turning away contributors unwilling or unable to run git-cl is doing them a favor in the long run. > I was just astonished to be asked to run a tiny doc > patch through a code-testing service. If you're lucky, somebody might offer to handle the "red tape" for you. But that would be a matter of individual luck and somebody individually offering. > I'll add an extra story which may give some context to my reaction. ... > That experience may have coloured my reaction when a small and > easy-to-include patch, knocked off as a friendly gesture to try and > make sure someone else didn't have the same scary experience I did > with the new doc build system, got in response a terse instruction > to submit it via a complicated and unfamiliar set of custom tools > whose whole raison d'etre is to test code, not docs. It was terse because I'm on vacation but I still need to deal with lilypond crap because it's likely that nobody else will. I've spent 6 hours sightseeing in Munich, but I'm spending the rest of the day in the hotel room doing lilypond, reviewing academic conference papers, and if I'm lucky working on my thesis. Tomorrow I'll go see the "science and technology" museum (maybe 4 hours?), then spend the rest of the day in my hotel room again. > I'm not trying to suggest that anyone is evil, bad or stupid, but it > really didn't seem to me to be the best way to handle things for a > case like this. Given the numerous problems that new contributors face, I believe that the most honest response is to discourage them. No, it's not easy. No, you won't get a lot of help. If that's not for you, then please wait a few months and try again -- hopefully things will be better then. This is not a pleasant policy, but I'm trying to save you guys (there have been other new contributors as well) a lot of heartache. It would be easy for me to write a "feel-good" email that encouraged you to keep on trying, but that would be dishonest since I know how hard it will be. - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel