Re: help wanted page

[Ian Hulin]

Graham Percival wrote:
> I've made a first draft of the "help us" page:
> http://kainhofer.com/~lilypond/Documentation/web/help-us.html
>
> I'm not very happy with the result, but I can't put my finger on
> precisely why.  Maybe it's that I've forgotten some ways that
> people can help, without source code, or without compiling
> stuff...?  Maybe it's just too wordy?  Maybe the OS-icons don't
> really help, and only clutter up the page?
>
> Opinions sought.
>
> Cheers,
> - Graham

Hi again, Graham,


"To get the source code, see Starting with git."
I've got problems with this here and in the CG.  The reason is that 
You're making a lot of assumptions about potential contributers' experience

o Readers may not have done work on a large project before, so may not 
have come across a change control system before.

o Readers may not (yet) know that git is a flavour of change control 
software.

o If they haven't worked on a large project before, they may not have 
come across building and dependency control software outside of an IDE 
like Delphi or Visual Studio, where it's done by magic 'under the 
bonnet'.  Familiarizing with make etc. will require a learning curve, 
let alone the baroque intricacies of stepmake, GUB, waf and all the rest.

o Somewhere (CG?) we need to spell out why the documenters and 
translators need source-code access.  Most technical writers on software 
projects do not have to do this - they generally work from 
design/internals documentation and talk to developers if they need real 
details on how things work.  In Lilypond we have a lot of stuff in the 
code that generates the internals documentation.

Cheers,

Ian