Re: Quit [now definitely O/T]

[Chris Snyder]

Hi Carl,

Thanks for the response. I had one of those "should I want to take that 
message back?" moments after sending my previous message - I regret the 
confrontational tone I took at times.

Carl Sorensen wrote:
> Thanks for your contributions.  I'm sorry for whatever part I've played
> in discouraging you.

Thanks. I've appreciated your patience the few times we've interacted, 
and I agree with Graham (at the risk of turning this into a "praise 
Carl" thread) that you do excellent work with shepherding new developers.

> I assume you're talking about the issue 415 stuff,
...
> So please, pick up your code again, and try to get the patch for 415 into
> shape so that it can be applied.  Joe will help you, I'm sure.  And Han-Wen
> isn't trying to keep you out; he's just trying to keep the code up to
> standard.  We really do *like* patches, even if sometimes it doesn't seem
> so.

Looking back at the thread, it does look to me now that I took Han-Wen's 
response too personally and I ended up tuning out a lot of the rest of 
the conversation. I revisited the branch I was working on, and - not 
surprisingly after eight months - it could not be cleanly rebased. I'll 
try to take a look at it, but it will take me a while to get back up to 
speed on it.

I think my experience does illustrate the care necessary in shepherding 
new developers. I think the LilyPond developer community would do well 
to treat newbies with kid gloves - contributing to a project for the 
first time can be intimidating. The Frogs program is a good step, but 
it's not very well publicized.

> If we had a perfect code-formatting tool, we could just run the files
> through the tool.  But we don't.

I vaguely remember some discussion on this at one point, but I can't 
find anything in the mailing list archives. I'd like to do some 
investigating as to what tools are available - it would save a lot of 
headache.

> I realize that it seems like jumping through mindless and unnecessary hoops.
> I've been there (had patches rejected because of bad indentation) and I
> remember the pain it was to completely reindent the file (as part of that
> process I learned to use the automatic indentation in vim).  But my code is
> easier to read (which is *really* important for Scheme code IMO), so it's
> worth the hassle.

I'm not going to argue against the benefits of readable code - I agree 
wholeheartedly (as my wife, who has done some first-draft engraving for 
me, can attest, I'm a stickler for formatting). It is difficult, 
however, to write code in a different style than the code right before 
and after the area I'm working on - especially since I was previously 
unfamiliar with the GNU style.

> > However, a lot of the code
> > is difficult to follow - when is stop_translation_timestep called in
> > engravers, for instance? It took me a while to understand that it will
> > be called even due to rhythms in other voices besides the one the
> > engraver is interested in.
>
> I didn't even know that.  I hope we can get this documented.  Would you be
> willing to take a stab at how events are passed to engravers (or how various
> routines inside an engraver are called from outside the engraver)?

Perhaps this could be part of a developer tutorial that details creating 
a new engraver from scratch? I'm envisioning a LM-equivalent for the CG 
with the same relationship that the LM has to the NR (the full names of 
which must not be named).

> "Thanks for your willingness to help. Unfortunately,
> we don't have a lot of documentation for that right now. And I can't think
> of a good discussion that took place on lilypond-devel, but you might find
> something if you search the archives.  The recommended way to figure out how
> LilyPond works is to read the source.  As you do, you may find some more
> specific questions to ask. Please feel free to come back with any further
> questions."

Unfortunately, this is often abbreviated as "Our entry point is in 
main() (lily/main.cc)..." - I'm thankful that verbiage has not been 
carried over to the new site.

> I hope this hasn't come across as defensive.  I'm sincerely trying to help.

Thanks. I appreciate your willingness to put up with me.

-Chris