Re: do you care about bug reports?

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:51:17AM -0700, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>      Here's a bug I submitted about a month ago.  I don't currently 
> see it in the bug tracker.

Apparently there's a backlog of 34 reports.

> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-lilypond/2009-09/msg00088.html

Hmm.  I looked at the output in 2.13.6, and it's not immediately
obvious what's wrong -- you say "not simply resized", but I can't
remember offhand what the "normal" piano brace is supposed to look
like.  If I was still doing bugs, I'd probably ask for more
information, such as a scan of a real score (or maybe a link to
such a score in IMSLP).


> Btw, is there anything analogous to "washing dishes to pay for
> your meal" around here?  

I do nothing but metaphorically wash dishes in lilypond, so yes,
there's a ton of work, of which a significant portion can be
easily delegated.

> I don't currently have the money to pay someone to fix the brace 
> problem (nor am I a programmer), but if there's some kind of tedious 
> Lilypond work I can do for someone to offset the workload and free them up 
> to look at more complex issues like this one, I'd be interested in helping 
> out.

Depends what you mean.  I doubt you can swap any work directly for
this issue.  In the long term, then yes, there's many jobs you can
do that would allow more experienced developers to tackle harder
problems.  Having (trained) users handle the initial bug reports
is one such example.

Another example fresh on my mind is the input syntax
standardization.  Most people complain about the changing syntax;
I'm ready and willing to start a project that will resolve this
problem.  But I'm not going to juggle three major projects at
once, so this is waiting until the new website is finished.
There's about 5 hours of crap work left to do (like comparing the
new Features page to the old "feature-related" pages), but it's
been like that since mid-Aug.

Even the new website itself is a project aimed at getting more
developers (the upcoming *maintained* Help Wanted page), reducing
support requirements (clearly warning about text input, easier
navigation of documentation), and generally attracting more
interest (which might result in more developers).

It's a long-term project, of course... it'll take months for users
to notice the new site, for the effects of the documentation to
trickle down, for the easier maintainability to make a real
difference in lilypond development.

Cheers,
- Graham