Re: contributing instructions are misleading!

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 06:35:36PM +0100, Janek Warchoł wrote:
> 2013/12/12 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
> > Sorry, this awoke Grumpy Graham.
> 
> I should have expected that.

Yes, you should have.  :P   Happy new year, BTW.

> Anyway, there are two parts to this cg cleanup:
> 1) removing obsolete info
> 2) reorganizing things.

Not quite.  1) is obvious, but equally important is 1.5) update
incorrect info.  Remember this latest iteration of interest in the
CG happened because one or two new contributors tried to follow
the published (incorrect) info, got into trouble, and
understandably were irritated.

Reorganizing is a seductively easy thing to propose, but it's
dangerous.  It's easy to have opinions about how things should be
structured, so it's a huge bike-shed debate.  Any proposal to
change the chapters and sections in the CG will involve at least
two weeks of debate on -devel.  Can you honestly say that another
argument like that would not reduce your motivation?  It would be
a shame if a bunch of good suggestions got lost (or delayed by a
few months) because they were wrapped up in a "reorganization"
patch.  Just look at the proposed website changes from a week or
two ago.

As an added bonus, if you make dozens of obviously good updates to
the CG over weeks and months, then people will gradually recognize
you as an authority on the subject.  Then if/when you propose some
reorganizations, they'll be less skeptical.

> > More thinking and discussion than we had the previous 4 times we
> > reorganized the CG?
> 
> Quite frankly, i'm pretty sure that i gave CG more thought than all of
> us combined since Waltrop 2012 ;-)

and before Waltrop, I spent 100x more time&effort on the CG than
you did.  Your point?

> Also, times change and stuff like CG gets out of date - even if it was
> ok after previous reorganization, it doesn't mean that a new
> reorganization isn't warranted, don't you think?

Not really.  We still have contributors who need encouragement and
an overview of development.  We still (I think) have lilydev, and
that's still (I think) no easier way to get started.  We still
have documentation, a website, programming in C++ and scheme, etc.

Granted, the previous plans about having "mentors" fell apart, so
those parts of the CG should be removed.  But other than that, I
think a reorganization would mostly be a distraction away from
fixing incorrect info.

Cheers,
- Graham