Re: does anybody care about LSR?

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Am Dienstag, 28. Juni 2011, 17:48:24 schrieb Graham Percival:
> I was discussing LSR with Phil, and it occurred to me that I
> should raise the question here.  What do we want from LSR?
> 
> As far as I'm concerned, no I don't care about LSR; the people who
> wanted it in the first place aren't maintaining it; we haven't had
> a flood of users volunteering to take care of it.  This experiment
> with "user-generated content" hasn't shown a clear net benefit to
> the project, 

It has definitely helped me A LOT, both when writing scores myself and when 
answering user questions on -user. When answering questions on -user, the 
first thing I do is go to the LSR search for an appropriate snippet and if 
there is one, I don't have any more work with the user request. That alone 
justified all work on the LSR and has a clear net benefit for me.

> and as more and more people use lilydev and send in
> patches, the need for something like LSR lessens.

No, that won't happen. LSR is something like a searchable FAQ for both common 
cases and special cases. Unless the manual gets some REALLY good search 
capabilities and anchors that you jump just to the right point without having 
to read through whole sections to find what you want, the LSR is just way more 
comfortable to work with.


> If somebody here *does* care, then speak up.  Please note:
> 
> 1. nobody is offering to touch the code behind it.  So don't say
> "hey, it would be great if LSR could automatically xyz" unless you
> think you can program the xyz yourself.

I wanted to and tried to install the LSR on my server so that I can improve 
the LSR (i.e. implement multiple lily versions in parallel, improve the page 
display by also showing a download link, etc.). However, I have absolutely no 
experience with tomcat, so that's where I failed. If someone with tomcat 
experience can help me set up the application on the server, I WILL improve 
the LSR and its code.


> 2. anybody with the source code can do much more efficient work by
> editing stuff in git directly.  The only point of LSR is to
> provide a quick, easy, automated repository for non-git people, so
> whenever somebody with git access touches LSR, it's a net loss for
> the project.

No, the LSR provides a dynamic, searchable FAQ for the end user to search for 
solutions to their problems -- both easy and hard problems. It's like those 
cookbooks for C/CSS/HTML/.. that you find in every book store. There are good 
language references available for each language as documentation, but those 
cook books are just as needed and really useful to the user.

Cheers,
Reinhold

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org