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

[Francisco Vila]

2009/8/10 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
> 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...

Sometimes we forget that LilyPond is a command-line app. We already
are losing users that do not want to write code. So, if you hate
command lines or writing code, you'll hate LilyPond.

LilyPond code is very easy for beginners and I have proved it. Git
basics are only slightly more difficult. Potential contributors who
previously qualify as frequent LP users are very used to write code,
so they will find as a natural extension to learn git basics and start
making patches whenever they want.

I personally find more complicated to understand overrides or to write

   lilypond -dbackend=eps -dno-gs-load-fonts -dinclude-eps-fonts --png myfile.ly

to obtain a decent cropped PNG than

  git pull + edit + git format-patch

to contribute to the docs.

-- 
Francisco Vila. Badajoz (Spain)
www.paconet.org
www.csmbadajoz.com