Re: critical issues

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2012 at 01:03:08AM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > We could certainly consider dropping support for OSX or windows.
> 
> That sort of token solidarity is actually counterproductive:
> if you believe that non-releases lead to non-users,

yes

> and you think that
> non-releases for GNU/Linux may pressure GNU/Linux developers into making
> OSX/Windows releases,

no

> then how does a non-release for GNU/Linux, with
> its corresponding result in decreasing GNU/Linux users and GNU/Linux
> developers, help in recruiting GNU/Linux developers that can be
> pressured into making OSX and Windows releases?

it doesn't?


Suppose we announce a big new shiny lilypond 2.16.  For linux and
freebsd only.  OSX and windows users can go screw themselves.

- what does this do to our ONLY documentation writers and
  reviewers (who are all windows-based)?  Will they be a) more
  motivated to work on lilypond, b) no change, or c) less
  motivated?
- what does this do to our active developers, approximately half
  of which are on OSX?  Will they be a) b) or c) ?


> And I don't think that we are doing ourselves a favor by
> defining "stable" as "a random moment when somebody managed to
> get GUB to run for Windows and OSX".

Good news, we're not.  We're definining "stable" as "is not
deliberately worse than the previous release, for all platforms
which we officially release for".  Plus a little bit of "... and
we can reasonably expect a reasonable contributor to be able to
contribute".

I will admit that the latter point could be construed as "if we
make it very difficult to contribute to lilypond, then I'm going
to punish everybody by not having stable releases" -- but almost
all of those "can't-contribute" bugs can be fixed in an hour or
two, and is platform-independent (or rather: it only involves
lilydev, which is ubuntu, most often inside virtualbox, so anybody
can work on that).

Cheers,
- Graham