Re: Remove old "News" entry from home page

[Federico Bruni]

Il giorno sab 18 lug 2015 alle 20:42, David Kastrup <address@hidden> ha 
scritto:
> Federico Bruni <address@hidden> writes:
>
> >  Il giorno sab 11 lug 2015 alle 9:28, Urs Liska <address@hidden> 
> > ha
> >  scritto:
> > >  These are all good ideas and suggestions. Now we need someone to
> > >  give it a try. I won't be able to do anythong about ut
> > >  unfortunately.
> >
> >  Unfortunately I'm scared away by texinfo, texi2html, the build 
> > system,
> >  etc.
> >
> >  I wish we could use a modern tool for the website (there are nice
> >  static website generators around.. I've recently started testing
> >  cactus¹). I'm pretty sure that other people might be more 
> > motivated to
> >  contribute if we changed the tool for the website only.
>
> We use the same input language for the website as for the rest of the
> documentation.  As a consequence, our website and main documentation 
> are
> maintained and kept up-to-date with respect to one another, and one 
> can
> search any website material in Emacs' info browser.

I understand that having to learn two input languages is not optimal, 
but I don't think that it's a big problem.
On the other hand I think that it's safe to assume that few people out 
there know texinfo and many more know markdown or HTML. If we care for 
contributors...

> What "tool for the website" will be maintaining literally thousands of
> LilyPond code examples and the resulting images?  And if we have 
> people
> motivated to contribute to web-only documentation, what is supposed to
> happen to the PDF manuals and the Info manuals?

I don't see any value in having the website in PDF or Info format and 
I'm pretty sure that at least 90% of lilypond users have the same 
opinion.


> And our web pages currently render perfectly well on pretty much every
> browser (including text browsers).  Many content creation tools don't
> render convincingly on less common browsers or screen resolutions.

Current website is not mobile friendly and this is not good for SEO:
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6196932?hl=en

The tools I'm thinking of use Bootstrap, which is responsive and mobile 
first:
http://getbootstrap.com/
> I don't really see that we have much to gain by forking part of our
> documentation off into different incompatible technology.
>
> >  I have the bad feeling that the issues marked with label website 
> > will
> >  remain open forever:
> >  
> > https://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/list?can=2&q=label%3Awebsite&colspec=ID+Type+Status+Stars+Owner+Patch+Needs+Summary&x=type&cells=tiles
>
> You won't get them magically closed by moving to another tool, and 
> we'll
> get a lot of new ones, to boot.  And when the people excited about
> hacking up a website on some new tool will become unexcited and
> eventually go away, there will be nobody who can pitch in without
> learning yet another tool.

I see a totally different reality, but I might be wrong. Let me list 
some points:

1. All the persons who built the lilypond build system left the 
project. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Who is going to fix all the issues related to website generation and 
translation? Who is going to spend work on trying to understand 
something extremely complex which can be useful only within the 
LilyPond project? I would not be optimistic...

2. We still depend on texi2html and the help request by Jean-Charles, 
who tried moving to texi2any, not surprisingly was ignored:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2015-05/msg00032.html

3. Some recent contributions to the website failed. The most important 
I can remember is the one by Urs. I'd be glad if he could share his 
thoughts on this matter.
I tried a very small contribution such as updating the screenshots of 
Denemo and Frescobaldi, but I was stuck and no one else did this 
apparently simple job:
https://github.com/gperciva/lilypond-extra/issues/20

The website home page should be the easiest thing to update. Let's see 
who will volunteer for this.

Refusing any change because it's a change is not good for the LilyPond 
project.
It brings only to stagnation.