Re: critical issues

[Boris Shingarov]

On 11-01-01 03:24 AM, Graham Percival wrote:
> or an
> art history / research grant.  I think the latter is more
> likely... for example, if somebody got a grant to typeset 17th
> century Norweigan folk songs, and decided to use lilypond, and
> spent x% of the grant towards "improving community-oriented tools
> for folk music archival", etc.
This is exactly what we have been doing here for a while.  In
act, it absolutely amazes me how closely you are describing our
project.  Only 100 years off (16th century instead of 17th),
and only a few hundred kilometers off.

But as I was trying to explain last summer, there are some problems.

The Lilypond project has a very specific set of objectives.  There
is a defined set of procedures, a roadmap, a set of criteria of
what is acceptable to go into the codebase, etc.

The music history research project, has its own set of objectives.
And its own set of rules.  And procedures.  And criteria of what
is acceptable.  When these rules contradict Lilypond rules, I
follow the history research project's rules, not the Lilypond
project's rules, because it is the music history research project
that pays me.  How contradictory are these rules, and how big is
the problem?

Well on one hand, none of today's Critical Issues in Lilypond,
are on the list of priorities for our project.  So even if we had
20 full-time developers, it wouldn't help with releasing the next
stable version.

On the other hand, we have implemented some major new
functionality.  Seamless markup-to-embedded-score integration,
automatic endnotes, merging and visual indication of used sources,
and a lot of other things.  Can it be contributed back?  Hardly
in its current form.  It causes a ton of regressions: basically,
it does not work on anything but Gregorian plainchant.  It will
immediately crash on any piano music or orchestral music.  Will
I fix it?  Not unless someone pays me to, and I know the music
historians will not, because they don't care.  What they (and
your Norwegian friends with their 17th century songs) care about,
is whether or not it is possible to typeset Norwegian lyrics.
Which it isn't -- and it's not even Lilypond's fault: SRFI-13
in Guile does not work with Unicode.

So we have all this work done, but it would be an even bigger
effort to merge it back.  Who will do it?  In the current
situation, I don't know.

However, I am making aggressive steps to change this.  As we
attract more attention from serious organizations, we get into
position to bring forward some conditions for the next project.
Namely, it will become imperative that all contributions get
merged back into the community codebase.  It still does not
mean helping with things like releasing the next stable version
of Lilypond, or similarly, with any part of Lilypond agenda;
although I am not sure if it is a bad thing -- if we want to
transition from being "a volunteer project with limited
resources" to "professional open-source", we will need to face
the fact that there are things which customers are willing to
pay for, and things which no-one finds important enough to
either work on themselves or pay for.

But first we will have to be successful to engage in the new
project.  It is still unclear whether it will happen or not.
I will keep you posted.

Boris