Re: Use of Stackoverflow for Question/Answer forum

[Trevor Daniels]

Ted, you wrote Monday, December 22, 2014 10:21 PM


> On Dec 22, 2014, at 4:26 PM, Garrett Fitzgerald <address@hidden> wrote:
>> It's actually been discussed on meta - consensus is that people should 
>> actually come over here for help. :-)
>
> So essentially, when you give this as the answer to the question "why not use 
> stack overflow," what you are really saying is "don't google for help with 
> Lilypond.   Instead, just ask your question."

Yes, or use the manuals.  They have good indexes, and much of what appears 
there is as a result of users asking questions on the mailing list.  Did you 
try looking for footnote in the index to the Notation Reference?  Although 
searching the mailing list archives directly is often productive. 
 
> That's sort of a reasonable thing to say: whenever I ask a question on the 
> mailing list, some helpful person (or likely two) come back with an answer.   
> But this isn't an answer that scales: if lilypond were to get more popular, 
> at some point this would no longer work, and it seems to me that the 
> difficulty of getting answers out of google is an impediment to lilypond's 
> popularity.

I think is scales very well.  More often than not it is users who answer 
questions on the user list, not developers.  So as the number of users 
increases so does the number of users willing to answer questions.
  
> It just astonishes me that when I google for something like "how to shrink a 
> staff in lilypond" I can't find any useful answer (although I find dozens of 
> copies of the same utterly absurd answer: just shrink the notes, but keep the 
> staff the same size!), and I think part of that is the way lilypond questions 
> are asked and answered.

Part of the reason for that is that the \magnifyStaff function was added only 
recently, to 2.19.12 in fact, and is not yet well-documented in the manuals.  
You'd get no better answer on Stackoverflow - I for one don't use it.

Trevor