Re: Web: Download: Add introductory text (issue 40510046)

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 07:48:28PM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > But it's actually quite off-putting when you prepare a patch that is
> > more or less based on a broad (and astonishingly productive)
> > discussion on lilypond-user, and then (after two steps of fine-tuning)
> > someone steps out and asks "why are you doing this?". (This is not
> > personal against Graham because I know next it might be someone else.)
> 
> Yes.  It is a major part of review processes that
> 
> a) some people come late into the game
> b) the preceding discussion on the user list is isolated from the actual
>    patch review process.

I want to emphasize these points.  The whole review process was
put into place to encourage the senior developers to stick around
and at least give comments on patches.  There's still a ton of
design decisions that are only known to the people who originally
wrote that code or document.  The goal is to allow & encourage
those people (which I guess include me now) to pass along reasons
why they made the decisions they did.

If patches were accepted and pushed within a day, the senior devs
might not have a chance to reply, and then give up on providing
any input at all.  Having a "patch countdown" of 48 hours or more,
with no "penalty" for people coming "late" to the discussion
(provided it's still within 48 hours), is a trade-off of
encouraging senior devs to comment vs. encouraging new developers
to make lots of changes.

Of course, I'm not clamining that the design decisions of previous
developers are necessarily correct.  Maybe after discussing it
with them, the community decides that it's worth breaking the
previous architecture plan.  But I think that discussion is well
worth having.

> > I don't want to imagine what happens if I propose my rewrite of the
> > Features page (http://www.openlilylib.org/lilyweb/features.html).

A rewrite of a single page has less impact than changing the
intended flow of a new reader through the website.  My only
problem with your proposed Features page is that it changes the
flow (i.e. the "where now?" box at the bottom).  If you changed it
back to the original "where now?" box, I'd have no problem with
that new Features page.

Cheers,
- Graham