Re: branching

[Carl Peterson]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Mike Solomon <address@hidden> 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, but the simple fact is that email is a terrible method of communication, when it comes to the things that you appear to be seeking. An amused or straightforward comment can across as harsh or sarcastic when visual and aural cues are absent (citing the studies that show that 90% of communication is nonverbal, i.e., not connected to the actual words). Some people's manners of speech translate into text-only communication better than others', and some don't translate at all. I had a boss a couple of years back who could be very friendly and personable face-to-face, but unless she was obvious happy about something, always came across as stern and upset with the way things were done. It happens. But you may already be well aware of all this.

It is regrettable that you would let such things interfere with your contributions to LilyPond. 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." I haven't made a commit yet, but that's probably a matter of weeks or days (whenever I get git-cl set up on my dev machine). In the meantime, instead of complaining about this feature or that feature, or going "Oh, poor, pitiful me, someone give me a code snippet to do x," I've tried to dig into things to make them work. Now the thing I'm trying to figure out is how to make what I'm doing usable for others who do the same things so that LilyPond is an easier environment to use. Will I ever get to where I'm wrangling the underlying C++ code? Probably not. But I'm working on what I can.

Cheers,

Carl P.