On Dec 11, 2013, at 12:03 AM, David Nalesnik <david.nales...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Carl Peterson <carlopeter...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Mike Solomon <m...@mikesolomon.org> wrote:
>
> The only hassle for me, which I did not run up against when I started with
> the project, is David’s way of communicating. I’m not claiming this is all
> on him, but I’m also pretty sure that I’m not the only one who has peaced out
> because of this. I am looking for ways for this to no longer be an issue. I
> was hoping that branches would go a way towards making this happen for myself
> and hopefully other developers, but it’s clear that this is not a good idea.
>
> In my two day jobs, director of the ensemble 101 and developer for the Guido
> project, I work with two (very different) teams of people on projects that
> require creativity, consistency, and tons of communication. Neither of them
> has any of this friction resulting from communication issues, both of them
> enjoy a diversity in major contributions, and both are evolving rapidly and
> stably in several interesting ways at the same time. I truly hope that
> LilyPond can be like that.
>
>
> I don't know how you communicate with your other two teams,
Face-to-face communication for one, e-mail for another.
> I always feel a bit silly writing emoticons and exclamation points, but they
> are nice to see(!)
>
> It is regrettable that you would let such things interfere with your
> contributions to LilyPond.
>
> Exactly. Both you and David are invaluable to this project. I watched the
> paralysis set in, the deadlock, and wondered a bit about the future of the
> project. I think there has to be some compromise in this
> Apollonian/Dionysian test of wills (to throw in a little pretentiousness).
See:
http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/Allows-minimum-length-to-work-for-end-of-line-spanners-issue-7453046-td141952.html#a142870
as one of several examples. There is truth in anything David says, meaning
that I (like him (and most of us on this list)) have caused bugs that I did not
find or fix before someone else. How, does this warrant this communication
style? This chain of e-mails was the single determinant that ruled LilyPond
out of a government funded, multi-national European typesetting project I’m
organizing in which the team will need to extend aspects of the software. I
imagined the score of man hours that goes into all the projects I do and how
important team morale is over the long term. I don’t want anyone on my team to
lose time feeling bad from e-mail confrontations - it’s not worth it for many
reasons.
>
> Ultimately, it is about the project, not the people. Perhaps
> counter-intuitively, the answer to the problem you perceive is not to reduce
> participation, but to increase participation. In my own case, my interactions
> with David had the effect of getting me more involved in the "behind the
> scenes" workings of the code. Why? So that eventually, David won't be able to
> criticize me for not being willing to "get my hands dirty."
>
> Well, I ordinarily have a bit of a thin skin, and I remember reading
> somewhere on the lists that you have to have some nerve to contribute. My
> personal response to the possibility of brutally honest criticism--which is a
> necessary thing if this project isn't going to go to hell--is to make sure
> I've got everything as polished as I can make it before I make it public.
> And accepting that I've got a lot to learn, (This is about me, and is in no
> way directed at you, Mike.)
Of course I have a lot to learn, too.
I release things in various states of polished-ness to the list, often because
its their unpolished-ness that I need comments or opinions on. This in and of
itself is valuable information. Imagining a hypothetical scenario where I sent
a patch that someone wants to see restructured into several commits before they
can review it. One developer responds:
It’s difficult for me to understand what you’re doing - please split it up.
and another responds:
Please act like a member of the community, start taking other people into
consideration and split up your patches.
The information is the same, but (A) makes me want to stay in the project a lot
more than (B). A lot of (B) causes me to lose interest. How does one proceed?
Should one gloss over the way (B) is written and get (A) out of it? Should
one respond to (B) on its own terms? How does one let these things not
interfere with one’s contributions?
I currently have a boss who is an industry-expert in typesetting that decided
not to get involved with LilyPond development 3 or 4 years ago because of feuds
he saw on the devel list. This is not good. By old developers not
contributing as much and new ones not wanting to join, our community has
dwindled down to one where 40% of commits are made by one person, and this is
including documentation, meaning that when it touches the folders ly/, scm/,
and lily/ it is a lot higher. Compare
http://www.ohloh.net/p/lilypond/contributors/summary to
http://www.ohloh.net/p/musescore/contributors/summary and
http://www.ohloh.net/p/supercollider/contributors/summary. LilyPond is not in
good shape.
David’s argument, which I agree with, is that LilyPond needs to get more
modular. This will make contributing easier while avoiding confrontation once
the barriers to entry are lower. Is it our desire as a community, then, to
give David stewardship over the bulk of developing the program until he gets it
to this point of modularity?
>
> However, when the standstill happens, something has to be done. I'm sorry
> that I don't have any solution to offer, other than to try to work together
> for the sake of LilyPond, (Emoticons! Kidding.)
I had coffee with a developer a year or so ago who told me that he dropped out
of the project because of commutation problems with David. Last night I wrote
to him to share some of these frustrations and he wrote back: “as long as David
is leading up the team, it’s a lost cause, nothing has changed and his way of
acting is too problematic, independently of his technical excellence.” I tend
to conceive of problems in terms of one, two, or many. The problem here has
reached the “many" level and I think we need to find a solution that goes
beyond the individual. List-etiquette policies, branching policies - I’m open
to trying anything.
One thing that is important to restate is that I realize that, unlike my
bad-but-getting-better commenting style, _all_ of this is out of David’s
control in that it stems from a medical issue. Which means that the
communication problems won’t go away - they’re going to be a fixture of
LilyPond development so long as he’s involved. As a group of humans, it is
_everyone’s_ responsibility to find creative ways to get past handicaps because
_no one_ wants to have them. What I’d like to see is a situation where David
can blow off steam however he needs to, he doesn’t feel like people are
ignoring him, and LilyPond can be a dynamic, multiplayer environment without
people getting offended and leaving the project.
Cheers,
MS
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