On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 22:39, John Check wrote: > On Thursday 12 August 2004 05:50 pm, Rick B wrote: <snip> > > .... it is the > > fact that most of the developers are coders as well as musicians, and > > thus have their proverbial plate full with two very time consuming > > pursuits, and have no time left to keep the documentation up to date. > > And that's precisely why we have to consider developers for whom coding isn't > a primary skill. If we can make things more attractive for people who can > build and test things without side tracking them, we would have a bigger pool > of documentation maintainers. I'm not sure it's possible to attract testing effort _without_ sidetracking those people - it's somewhat of a necessity given the (often alpha) nature of the development. You need a certain sort of person to deal with frustration and testing - preferably one who has an axe to grind :) Some time ago I offered my services (months of cvs up; ./configure; make; make install every night) to a project in the knowledge that it would consume all of my spare time for a few months - and I did so for two reasons; 1. due to an accident I had rather a lot of time to spare, and wanted to make something useful from that time 2. i believed in the goals of that project and wanted to help it reach those goals (so I could actually use it - [see, selfish really]). Perhaps others can offer alternative (ideally honest) reasons - if we need people to knock the rough edges off of the 'product', then we need to know who they are and why they do it. For my part, I evangelise Linux Audio to anyone who'll listen. I send them URL's when they least expect it. I also conduct reading-comprehension tests to make sure they read them :) cheers R
