Re: the "r" in "git pull -r"

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 10:50:09AM +0200, John Mandereau wrote:
> Le lundi 10 août 2009 à 01:18 -0700, Graham Percival a écrit :
> > We've lost 50% of potential contributors to the website because of
> > git.
> 
> And we've lost the same percentage of potential French translators; I'm
> sorry to remark that most of them who didn't spend the effort to master
> Git and stopped contributing didn't spend much effort either to look for
> accurate translation of musical and other technical terms, or even
> respecting Texinfo format editing (I once got a translation in ODT!)
> which is yet far simpler and comfortable than XML-based formats or PO.

I agree that there's a correlation between willingness to learn
git and quality of work.  I'm not opposed to asking contributors
to jump through _some_ hurdles; I just think we don't have the
right balance yet.  Off the top of my head, I'd guess that we want
to discourage 25% of potential contributors.

> > We want people working on lilypond, not working at understanding
> > git.
> 
> Agreed.  Many people are scared by just using command line, and I doubt
> we'll manage to get the procedure above simpler, so the only solution is
> providing another way to contribute, e.g. a web interface that is not
> read-only but that allows retrieval and submission of individual files
> or file sets,

IIRC you or Valentin have mentioned this in the past.  How would
this work with, say, documentation?  Would a potential contributor
retrieve the "doc file set" (autogen.sh + Documentation/,
potentially trimming out the translations)?

I'm not eager to drop the "does it compile?" question for
contributors, even for documentation.  Apart from people on
windows who *cannot* compile the docs, I'd still ask doc
contributors to build the docs locally.

Cheers,
- Graham