Uwe Stöhr wrote:
> Sometimes I'm really close to stop working for LyX. I'm frustrated that we
> don't focus on real life. Real life means for me that a student coming from
> school to the university has to write his first internship report. He will
> not know computer internals, knows perhaps a little Word, how to use
> Facebook and to write emails. LaTeX is complicated and you have to learn a
> lot to be able to use it. That is why Matthias Ettrich came to the
> conclusion that LaTeX will only be a success when it is as easy to handle
> like e.g. Word (he told me this at our last meeting) and therefore started
> LyX. That is also my opinion and that is why I work for LyX.
> Back to my example. The student decides to use LyX because a colleague told
> him about it and he is happy that he can write all the complicated equation
> and citations easily. Short before the deadline he thinks, that it would be
> fancy to use an initial for the acknowledgments. He is using your style but
> suddenly cannot compile the file - panic! What means "LaTeX error"? what is
> this cryptic error message is about? Damn, what nasty bug. The problem is
> now that he made a lot of other changes after inserting the initial and
> therefore don't come to the idea that the initial module is the reason of
> the bug. A nightmare for him and even if he is able to find the problem, he
> won't recommend LyX to his friends and they not to their friends, and so
> on.
this is deeper and almost philosophical disputation about the open source
model. until we want to turn this into software business i don't think your
points hold.
1. the basic fact of "real life" is that lyx and this community exists.
2. it continues to exists because there are volunteers who contribute to it.
3. thus the fundamental measure of survival and success is not the number of
+1 on facebook but number of contributor volunteers. (of course it correlates
with the size of all the user base, but its not the *basics*).
3. these volunteers do not come from people you describe in this and other
mail, ("knows perhaps little word, facebook, write email; knows
nothing about 'behind scenes', knows nothing about open source,
wants something which 'just work' and panics when problem arise")
4. instead they come from people who know more, are curious whats
behind the scenes and generally are technical problem-solvers.
5. paradoxically, bugs do stimulate group (4) and create new contributors.
6. if you annoy group 3, you can't make it software standard
but the project lives. if you annoy group 4, project is dead.
or there is more business-like model. you are not interested of new incoming
contributors, but for paying users; they pay your work and they have full right
to panic
when something goes wrong. and of course, why they should be interested whats
behind the scenes or even fixing something. if you annoy group 4 not much living
community around, but project can continue. if you annoy group 3 project is
dead.
of course the best is to please both 3 & 4, but thats sometimes difficult
since to build idiot-proof system means prohibit many things which enjoy
group 4 ;)
> therefore fight against this way of working. We are all making bugs and
> every software has bugs but to introduce a bug purposely is something I
> cannot understand.
you cannot understand because you misinterpret me.
the choice was not between problematic and non-problematic support, but
between problematic and no support. at that moment the probability and
seriousness of the problem looked to me low and even the sent counterexample
can be made compilable again by ERT after the charstyle.
i also don't see why you want to fight "against this way of working".
two times appeared this module on the list, once with the question about
parameters
and if you raised your voice against it would be showstopper for me without any
fight. if you are extremely touchy about latex troubles then do overview
latex-related
patches - i'll be happy, you know latex better than me.
i'm extremely touchy about another parts of the code and there is no single
patch which goes without my attention there. what other workflow do you propose.
now its in 2.0.0 and there is compatibility issue, but thats different story.
>>> We worked hard that this doesn't happen
>>> otherwise LyX would be quite useless for real life documents like a
>>> thesis
>>> or a business report. Where do you see that problems? If there is one it
>>> is
>>> a bug we need to fix.
>>
>> especially the starting pages of papers with wild combination of title,
>> date,
>> subtitile, authors, affiliation, abstract are rich source of latex errs.
>
> Can you please provide an example with the bug you are encountering.
>
>> uisng space inset is magic, ie. you can not trust that putting 1.mm space
>> in lyx document
>> will have this result in pdf output. you never know what happen unless you
>> latex it.
>
> If this would be the case, LyX would be unusable. Of course you get 1 mm
> space when you insert it or do you have an example where this is not the
> case?
>
>> or mixing different latex packages.
>
> Not when using the packages supported by LyX. For TeX Code it is of course
> your turn as it is then your decision that you want to use it purposely
> this way.
>
>> or using different output routes
>> like postscript vs pdf.
>
> PDF is a subset of PostScript, so this is also not true. What is true is
> that the different converters act sometimes differently but we already
> catch the known problems. As soon as a user informed us about such a
> problem, we could fix this in the past.
> OK, DVI is a special format and we therefore described everything in the
> docs according to PDF output and describe the limitations of DVI.
>
>> or insert weird combination of insets into each other.
>
> Do you have an example? If so, we must fix it.
all the examples given above happen to me during last half year, of course
i dont them have at hand as lyx files. the bill from last two weeks which are
clearly in
my memory cache would something like:
- insetspace around pictures and inside figure floats were ignored unless and
special ERT was pushed
(this is regular problem and i learned to automatically run preview whenever
vertical insetspace
is used, except normal text flow).
- postscript and pdf output was different
->for proofreading of book wrt visible change tracking in output
->hyperlinks doesn't break in postscirpt, but fine in pdf
->while checking lettrine examples you send postscript output was
different with some parameters compared to pdf.
- pushing footnote-like inset in one of the environments of front page issued
latex err
i'm not writing this in order to bitch about these issues or because i want
them to be fixed. everything works in 99% of cases and its usually one minute
of playing to get it fixed.
i write this just to show that my encouter with latex issues is quite regular
and to encounter another one is not surprise or some rare event which should
make user hysterical in general.
pavel
