RE: Stepping down and moving on

[Mark Stephen Mrotek]

David.

Thank you for all of your support - intellectual, material, and
philosophical.
May your new position provide all the success that you deserve.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: David Kastrup [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2016 9:10 AM
To: address@hidden
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Stepping down and moving on


Hi folks and team,

while I haven't really occupied an official function in LilyPond
development, it's hard to deny that I have effectively functioned as acting
chief architect and vetter (with a rather mottled performance).

Partly in connection with a drop of my productivity particularly this year,
the amount of financial support for my work from members of the LilyPond
community went down from overall survivable to disastrous.  Of course this
is bitter for those of you that did contribute in significant amounts to my
subsistence but I have to be moving on.

I have accepted a full-time development (and team management) position with
another company.  Due to their project and team expansion plans, I will be
starting already in December.

This employment is in another city.  I'll be travelling back and forth
weekly for the foreseeable future.  While I might be working on some
LilyPond side projects interesting to me occasionally, I will not be able to
do any serious amound of coordination or other activity involving me with
LilyPond's community.

As my communication style has proven to be a somewhat mixed blessing for the
purpose of attracting long-term developers, I expect that this may help in
the long run for finding a different balance of areas LilyPond is getting
worked on.

During his tenure as LilyPond leader, Graham has demonstrated that even
without a central technical lead there is a lot of potential to focus the
resources of people willing to work on and expand LilyPond and we have been
continuing to reap the results of his talent for organizing people into
useful teams even though I have not really figured out how to fill gaps in
the various teams and tools managing LilyPond's infrastructure to offset the
"natural" amounts of fluctuation.

I'll try seeing through the release of 2.20 in the little time remaining to
me both before and after starting my job.  My main worry is the current
comparative amount of instability with regard to font handling, and my main
bad taste is that 2.20.1 will not be able to support Guile 2: there is no
way that anything deserving the label of "stable"
and including Guile 2 will come about in the rest of my tenure.

There are also several half-completed features that are a nuisance.
I do not expect to be able to to a significant amount of work on them in the
foreseeable future.

Once consequence, of course, is that my requirement for funding is over.
I am greatly thankful to the people who have enabled me to keep working on
LilyPond as long as I did, but what remains in my bank account, in spite of
being quite less than what I started with when working on LilyPond, is
sufficient to tide me over the time to my first paycheck.

So I would ask you to cancel any regular bank payments you might still have
in place as of December: I don't see that I will have a reasonable chance at
returning a tangible value for them.

Thanks for making me stay in the pond as long as I did!

--
David Kastrup