Re: Users versus developers (was: Tempo mark alignment)

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 10:10:32AM -0500, Tim McNamara wrote:
>
> On May 23, 2009, at 6:34 AM, Graham Percival wrote:
>
>> My goal is not to insult you into feeling bad; my goal is
>> to insult you into HELPING US FIX THINGS.  Learn scheme.  Join the
>> Frogs.  Contribute to lilypond.  If everybody sits around saying
>> "why doesn't somebody fix this", then it WILL NEVER BE FIXED.
>
> "Helping" takes many forms.

Given that I've spent approximately 3000 hours working on lilypond
without touching code, I know.

> Like many LilyPond users, I know nothing useful about computer  
> programming and so cannot help with correcting problems in the code.  I 
> have a full time-plus highly demanding job, a marriage, a house, ailing 
> parents, I play music and have other hobbies.

So do most of the developers.



Look here, this wasn't a user saying "hey, I find this confusing"
on the -user mailist.  This wasn't somebody saying "it's a shame
this bug still exists".

Xavier "allowed [himself]" to "bump" a message to lilypond-devel
to tell us that nobody's fixed his particular favorite bug yet.
He has an "expectation to see this issue fixed".  What's more, he
realized that the message "looks a bit offensive".

To many developers, this messages translates like this:

HEY, YOU LOSERS!  I DEMAND THAT YOU IGNORE YOUR JOBS, FAMILIES,
AND THE 400 OTHER BUGS THAT YOU ALREADY KNOW ABOUT, AND WORK ON
THE BUG THAT I WANT FIXED.


This is both rude and stupid.  Rude, because it's making demands
when one has no right to make demands.  Stupid, because it's
counter-productive.  When people start making demands out of what
I do in my free time, I feel *less* inclined to do work for them,
not more.


> Using LilyPond and providing feedback from the "naive user" perspective 
> is helpful,

That's not what he was doing.

> The documentation is at times difficult and opaque.  It is the
> newbies and non-programmers who will tend to remind us of this
> fact.  

I'd like to publicly thank you for all the effort you spent
improving the documentation during our year-long "Grand
Documentation Project", where I bent over backwards organizing
people to discuss and contribute to the docs.

... I'd _like_ to thank you, but it didn't turn out that way.
Maybe you'd like to be involved -- at least in providing comments
-- the next time I organize such a project?

(if you don't believe my comments about GDP, please look at the
mailist archives to see the occasional discussions, and the many
many times I spent begging people to read the updated docs and
give comments.  It was _very_ frustrating for new doc contributors
to spend 50 hours rewriting a chapter, and then receive absolutely
no feedback about their efforts from the community)


> Telling them that they have no right to comment is not helpful because 
> the project loses their insights and may lose them as users.

They can comment.  If they complain, I'll complain back.

Cheers,
- Graham