Re: Code formatter

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 11:23:55AM -0700, Carl Sorensen wrote:
> Jan believes that code formatting standards should be no more restrictive
> than the GNU standards.

By the way, if somebody has a compelling argument why we should
differ from the GNU standards, I'm willing to go up against Jan.
But before I do that, I need to be *convinced* that the
alternative is right.

> This same issue is relevant in the discussion about going to Lua.  Lua is
> not GNU software.  It does use the MIT license, which is GPL compatible,
> according to the FSF.

That's not an issue.  The issue is that rewriting lilypond would
take thousands of hours of work, and nobody wants to do that work.
Besides, I really thought that the Lua-talk was a joke.

Some people at my university want to rewrite lilypond in Haskell
-- again, they weren't serious about it.  The notion was just a
"hey, wouldn't it be cool if...?" thing.

> It seems to me that we don't have support from the core developers to move
> to a more Windows-friendly development environment.

That's absolutely false.  (yes, I'm going to speak on behalf of
Han-Wen and Jan here, as well as from myself)

The core developers have a better estimate of the enormous amount
of work it would take to rewrite lilypond in lua, java, or
whatever was being proposed.  Also possibly rewriting it to avoid
using various libraries... so maybe re-implementing fontforge,
pango, etc etc etc.

One reason behind the switch to a new build system (waf) is
precisely to make things easier for windows developers.  Ok, we're
doing the doc stuff first -- but if that works well, then we'll do
the actual executable build system as well.

How many people are helping with that?  ... yeah, thought so.


If anybody has a CONCRETE proposal on how to make things easier
for non-Linux developers... along with the manpower required to
IMPLEMENT those proposals... I'm more than willing to listen.  If
their proposal includes a relatively minor amount of work from the
core developers, I'm willing to do it.  If the proposal boils down
to "hey, how about you guys rewrite it in visual basic, while I
continue to complain about bugs and the lack of a wiki"... then
they won't get anywhere.

Cheers,
- Graham