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Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment)
From: |
Graham Percival |
Subject: |
Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment) |
Date: |
Sun, 24 May 2009 15:39:34 +0800 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) |
On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 10:10:32AM -0500, Tim McNamara wrote:
>
> On May 23, 2009, at 6:34 AM, Graham Percival wrote:
>
>> My goal is not to insult you into feeling bad; my goal is
>> to insult you into HELPING US FIX THINGS. Learn scheme. Join the
>> Frogs. Contribute to lilypond. If everybody sits around saying
>> "why doesn't somebody fix this", then it WILL NEVER BE FIXED.
>
> "Helping" takes many forms.
Given that I've spent approximately 3000 hours working on lilypond
without touching code, I know.
> Like many LilyPond users, I know nothing useful about computer
> programming and so cannot help with correcting problems in the code. I
> have a full time-plus highly demanding job, a marriage, a house, ailing
> parents, I play music and have other hobbies.
So do most of the developers.
Look here, this wasn't a user saying "hey, I find this confusing"
on the -user mailist. This wasn't somebody saying "it's a shame
this bug still exists".
Xavier "allowed [himself]" to "bump" a message to lilypond-devel
to tell us that nobody's fixed his particular favorite bug yet.
He has an "expectation to see this issue fixed". What's more, he
realized that the message "looks a bit offensive".
To many developers, this messages translates like this:
HEY, YOU LOSERS! I DEMAND THAT YOU IGNORE YOUR JOBS, FAMILIES,
AND THE 400 OTHER BUGS THAT YOU ALREADY KNOW ABOUT, AND WORK ON
THE BUG THAT I WANT FIXED.
This is both rude and stupid. Rude, because it's making demands
when one has no right to make demands. Stupid, because it's
counter-productive. When people start making demands out of what
I do in my free time, I feel *less* inclined to do work for them,
not more.
> Using LilyPond and providing feedback from the "naive user" perspective
> is helpful,
That's not what he was doing.
> The documentation is at times difficult and opaque. It is the
> newbies and non-programmers who will tend to remind us of this
> fact.
I'd like to publicly thank you for all the effort you spent
improving the documentation during our year-long "Grand
Documentation Project", where I bent over backwards organizing
people to discuss and contribute to the docs.
... I'd _like_ to thank you, but it didn't turn out that way.
Maybe you'd like to be involved -- at least in providing comments
-- the next time I organize such a project?
(if you don't believe my comments about GDP, please look at the
mailist archives to see the occasional discussions, and the many
many times I spent begging people to read the updated docs and
give comments. It was _very_ frustrating for new doc contributors
to spend 50 hours rewriting a chapter, and then receive absolutely
no feedback about their efforts from the community)
> Telling them that they have no right to comment is not helpful because
> the project loses their insights and may lose them as users.
They can comment. If they complain, I'll complain back.
Cheers,
- Graham
- Re: Tempo mark alignment, (continued)
- Re: Tempo mark alignment, Graham Percival, 2009/05/23
- Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Tim McNamara, 2009/05/23
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Valentin Villenave, 2009/05/23
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Ari Torhamo, 2009/05/23
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Anthony W. Youngman, 2009/05/23
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Ari Torhamo, 2009/05/23
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Tim McNamara, 2009/05/23
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Graham Percival, 2009/05/24
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Tim McNamara, 2009/05/24
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment), Anthony W. Youngman, 2009/05/24
- Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment),
Graham Percival <=
- Message not available
- Re: Tempo mark alignment, Jay Anderson, 2009/05/23
- Re: Tempo mark alignment, Neil Puttock, 2009/05/27
- Re: Tempo mark alignment, Andrew Hawryluk, 2009/05/28
- Re: Tempo mark alignment, Reinhold Kainhofer, 2009/05/29
Re: Tempo mark alignment, Valentin Villenave, 2009/05/23