Re: The hel-arabic.ly file story...

[David Kastrup]

Amir Czwink <amir130@hotmail.de> writes:

> Thanks for your responses.
>
> First and foremost: I'm not trying to accuse or hold someone
> accountable. I'm trying to understand (and idealistically improve) the
> process.

[...]

> But I wonder, how the process will work then? Every one simply commits
> what he thinks is best and we regularly overwrite each others
> contributions? That can't be in the best interest of nobody...

Well, any expenditure and continuation of effort is voluntary.  So the
modus operandi is that everybody tries figuring out based on what is
there and on the feedback of others how to best achieve progress in the
area of their interest and then propose a contribution that others may
vet to various degrees.

Depending on how specific such an area of interest may be, the quality
and extent of vetting may end up different.  A lot of contributions are
isolated with regard to how they affect the rest of the project: that
may result in its inclusion even if their code quality may seem to be
lacking in some respect.

However you rate contributions, I don't think that many are
characterized by willful sloppiness, namely a lack of quality stemming
from a lack of effort.

Large cohesive work on the whole code base is more likely to be driven
by people drawn in by their fascination/obsession with the code/language
rather than a specific musical problem.  So the more special music
problems have a tendency to have code less in line with the style and
quality of the core code.

You have to see where you see your place in such a situation.  The one
thing that makes comparatively little sense is complaining: things here
will only get done by people doing them.  Nobody is getting paid here,
and complaints are rather limited in their capacity to motivate people.

So usually your outrage tends to be better spent in improving
code/coding rather than asking others to improve it: after all, you tend
to be most motivated about the task in the first place.

-- 
David Kastrup