Re: New LilyPond website

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Dec 04, 2016 at 04:06:53AM +0000, Karlin High wrote:
> >From: Graham Percival <address@hidden>
> >Sent: Saturday, December 3, 2016 3:35 PM
> >   
> >If there was a single mentor for the new contributor, and if other
> >people didn't make well-intentioned but ultimately misleading
> >suggestions, we could have avoided 95% of this mess.
> 
> Dunno quite, but I gather you have far more experience in this area.

:)

> To me, a good web developer is someone with the technical skill
> of a computer programmer and the creativity and "style sense" of
> a graphic designer. I think people with those skill sets are
> rare indeed if they take kindly to being told how to do their
> own work in somebody else's way, and how and why their preferred
> methods are unsuitable for the job at hand.

Going by your definition of "web developer", I do not think they
would be a suitable match for the LilyPond project.  That is not
to cast doubt on their skills, and certainly not on their
employability or desirability for a large number of other
organizations.

This is a community project -- and in particular, a community
project of people who are attracted to highly polished music
engraving.  The ability to communicate well and navigate our loose
social organization is much more important than design ability.
This may well result in a less flashy website design, but I will
*enthusiastically* embrace that trade-off if it makes our existing
developers feel more positive about the project.

I am absolutely serious about that final clause.  Most people do
not realize how few people are working on LilyPond, and how much
more difficult it becomes when experienced developers leave.

> Couldn't offering a mentor leave the impression that the
> LilyPond community thinks they don't know their stuff?

I chose the word "mentor" because that's the word that Debian
uses.  Nobody can just sign up and start uploading packages; you
must have an existing Debian developer to mentor you, approve your
changes, and upload material on your behalf until you are deemed
to be sufficiently experienced with their particular system and
policies.

I'm certainly open to using another word if it can convey a
similar meaning without any unintended connotations.

> Maybe there's a parallel here: how about having the lilypond.org
> web development done by a current LilyPond documentation
> contributor (if any can be spared for the work)

heh.

I mentioned earlier "how few people are working on LilyPond"?  I
do not believe [1] that there are any dedicated LilyPond
documentation contributors at the moment.  Oh, there's a few
people who can make a few edits -- when they're not reporting
bugs, building releases, testing proposed patches for bugs, etc
etc.

There is a huge backlog of tasks.  Some of them are quite
complicated, of course, but many could be done by any reasonably
intelligent person who is willing to spend 3-5 hours a week
helping out.  And yes, improving the website CSS is one such
simple task [2].

[1] if there are such people, my apologies; I'm still getting up
to speed.

[2] For example, we currently define the font size in two places
in terms of pixels, instead of em.  So, task 1: replace "19px"
with "1.25em" in lilypond-website.css.  Then test on a few
different browsers.  There are websites which will let you test
web designs in browsers, and even on mobile devices.  If the
result looks ok, we'll get that patch put into operation.

Is this difficult?  Not at all.  That's one of the great tragedies
of our project.  If I took all the time I spent reading and
writing emails in this thread, and instead worked on the website
CSS, most of the problems would be fixed by now.  However, that
wouldn't help with the lack of contributors to LilyPond in the
long run.

Cheers,
- Graham