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Re: PDF Problem


From: Graham Percival
Subject: Re: PDF Problem
Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 00:14:44 +0800
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 05:15:33PM +0200, Mats Bengtsson wrote:
> For example, Graham has worked day and night during more  
> than a year to bring the documentation into it's current shape and I  
> understand that he can feel personally insulted if someone dares  
> criticize his own "baby".

It depends on the criticism.  If it's well-thought out and
delivered politely, I respond well.  If somebody says "hlp where
do i put this command, ur docs sux just like all other open source
docs", then I respond negatively.  Also, I respond *very*
negatively to people making demands, either of me, or of
programmers.

Actually, demanding/impolite users are the main reason I decided
to leave LilyPond two years ago.

> If you recognize yourself in this description, watch out so you  
> don't get burned out.

If this is directed at me, then yes, there were a few times during
GDP when I struggled with some of the changes -- in particular
with Trevor's work on the LM.  (not the famous dispute in Oct
2007, but later, smaller things, in 2008)

Actually, that still happens -- witness the recent discussion
about clarifying note syntax (pitch-dur-other).


But I always reminded myself of the golden rule of open-source
work: he who has the gold, makes the rules.  's/has the gold/does
the work/', obviously.  As long as the author is aware of the doc
guidelines and the reasons behind them, I'm ok with whatever they
did (within reason).  I think this also came up once or twice with
Carl's docs on chords and Valentin on text as well... anyway, the
specifics aren't important.


> I think that in some time, Graham will get a more humble attitude  
> towards the outcome of the GDP

In one way, GDP was a failure -- I wanted to leave a team of doc
writers so that they could handle whatever came up fairly easily.
(un)fortunately, most doc writers have moved on to do bug work.

I say "(un)fortunately", because we need programers much more than
doc writers.  So in the long term, this is best... also, since I
re-joined the project, there isn't so much urgency to have a
Graham-independent doc team.


In another way, it was a mixed success and failure.  We're getting
fewer "where do i put this command" questions, and I don't recall
many questions that touch on NR 1.  OTOH, there's still tons of
vocal questions -- but that was the biggest section in NR 2 that
wasn't worked on.  This suggests that GDP did good work at the
material it covered, but we still need a GDP2 to cover the
remaining stuff.  :|


> Myself, I have in some sense been at the other end of the scale,
> spending far too much  time on answering questions on the
> mailing list trying to adapt the  answer to the expected level
> of knowledge of the person asking the  question, when I probably
> would have spent much of the time in a better  way if I had
> contributed more to the documentation to avoid getting many  of
> the questions.

Actually, you were the inspiration for me to get involved in the
docs in the first place.  I wanted to reduce the amount of basic
questions you got, so that you could spend time on more
interesting ones (including my own questions).  :)

Cheers,
- Graham




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