Re: critical issues

[Łukasz Czerwiński]

On 3 January 2012 21:47, Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> wrote:

> I am a TeX specialist, system programmer, Emacs specialist, the GNU
> maintainer (and a rather pitiful one) for AUCTeX (lytex and itexi
> anybody? preview-latex for Lilypond?)

Mmm... Preview for Lilypond? Sounds like a good start for a realtime GUI for Lilypond (a better Denemo). I believe this will result in a fast increase in number of Lilypond users. What do you think?

> I would have no problems spending a few hundred man years focused on
> Lilypond.  Except that I don't have a few hundred man years.  Nobody
> has.  The next best option is spending time on multipliers.  Getting
> LilyPond in a shape where passersby find it intriguing, to a degree
> where they get hooked and contribute manmonths of work over some time
> without having planned to do so at the start.

+1

and:

> The only thing that is going to help is more eyes, more people who get

> interested, more people discovering dark corners and doing something

> about them.

and:

> To get there, we need serious programmers and serious musicians

> interested seriously in LilyPond.  To a level where they start asking

> good questions.  And we better be in a position to provide answers,

> since there is no more effective way to spend our time than on getting

> more people to spend their time, and love, and interest.

and:

That's like +1111 from me!
In general, i agree that we should think in a more 'release-oriented'
way ("last stable release was half a year ago, so we should make
another one, so i'm fixing whatever needs to be fixed to make this
possible") instead of 'free coding' way ("i care about this issue,
i'll fix it.  And that one.  Oh, we have 0 criticals, so let's make a
stable release before an obstruction occurs!").  To do so, we would
have to work more as a team, less independently.  How can we achieve
that if GOP7 showed that we don't want to?

and:

> And we better be in a position to provide answers,
> since there is no more effective way to spend our time than on getting
> more people to spend their time, and love, and interest.

Regarding all those fragments of Janek's and David's emails: For some time I have been observing how bug are being fixed in Lilypond and spent some time on conversations with Janek.

For me there is almost no team work in Lilypond - only a bunch of geek trying to fix some issues, but without a leader who coordinates all actions. As far as I remember, some time ago you have tried hard to make some big changes in Lilypond, but finally there was no big revolution...

Without a leader that will make key design & implementation decisions Lilypond will improve in a slow pace, letting Finale and Sibellius gain more and more users. Probably some of you will return to the old row - is a goal of a Lilypond to substitue Finale or compete with Sibellius. I think there is no point in loosing your energy and time on that. 

Instead we should do as much as possible to constantly improve Lilypond. That means not only fixing critical bugs, but also: anticipating future stability problems, constantly improving end user documentation and the quality of source code (reduce complexity, comment code and so on). By now there is a huge work to be done and Lilypond needs someone who will form guidelines and priorities.

Łukasz (Luke)