Re: Prefer luatex for documentation

[Jean Abou Samra]

   

     Le 21 nov. 2022 à 16:53, Luca Fascione <l.fascione@gmail.com> a
     écrit :

   
   On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 2:06 PM Werner LEMBERG <[1]wl@gnu.org> wrote:

     The thing is: Something might happen if I'm not available, for
     whatever reasons.  It definitely *is* a high maintenance cost if a
     single developer is responsible...

   But that's true of any one feature: I build you a nice template library
   to do <whatever> in <whatever situation>
   and you find a bug while I'm <on vacation>. That can always happen, we
   know this, we cope with it.
   How's the TeX/texinfo build any different?

     > And to what Wols said: I agree completely, it should be _all_
     about
     > the users, coding is an act of service, not self-gratification.
     The
     > joy comes from making (other) humans happy, not compilers...
     I disagree, it is *not* all about the users.  There must be a
     balance
     between what the developers want to do or can do, and what the users
     expect.  Promising stuff to the user, which later on fails due to
     the
     lack of developer resources, is bad.

   Forgive me Werner, but it appears to me your own closing point is
   actually precisely about the users, isn't it?
   If I may paraphrase what I hear you say: "The users are being
   disserviced (is that a word?) thereby this is bad". I agree, of course.
   This IS bad.
   The users are being provided with an unsatisfactory experience, and
   that is undesirable.
   And it seems to me you're concerned in the same way as I am: our
   role here is in service of a community that engraves music sheets.
   When we stop these people, impede their progress, make their planning
   invalid
   (possibly because we're not delivering to what we promised), we are
   behaving poorly to them. I share that concern, and I think it's a very
   ethically
   sound concern to have, it's an important thing to worry about, I'd say.
   I'd characterize it as a user-focused concern, no?

   I think we are losing sight of the question at hand. The origin of this
   “users vs developers” debate is that Wols criticized me for seemingly
   minimizing the importance of typography for my own reading experience
   of the manual compared to maintenance tasks I might personally need to
   work on (or that is how I understood it). To which I replied that I am
   not minimizing the importance of typography for myself when I read the
   manual, but its importance for all users, compared to availability of
   the documentation for all users and other work that developers are able
   to do for the benefit of all users if their maintenance burden
   decreases.
   Jean

References

   1. mailto:wl@gnu.org