Re: 2.14 release: good news and bad news

[Valentin Villenave]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Good news: we're down to 18 release-blocking items: 9 code, and 9
> non-code.  I can't really estimate the time required to fix the code
> regressions.  The other items are all 2-10 hours.  So 2.14 might
> happen in Feb.  Granted, this doesn't include any new regressions that
> we might discover when we announce a beta version and finally invite
> users to try 2.13.

I have taken some measures to be more available for LilyPond (I'm
limiting myself to working 5h a day on political stuff, and even then
that's very difficult to achieve!). So hopefully I can help with
non-GUB and non-doc bugs.

> Bad news: I'm fairly appalled at the materials for my department's
> "introduction to programming" course.  Apparently this course has a
> horrible reputation -- even good students who instructors are trying
> to recruit as PhD students end up almost failing the course, and only
> scrape through by doing an exam resit.  The general consensus appears
> to have been "oh, engineers can't do programming", and nobody cared
> about it.  Well, *I* care about programming, and after teaching the
> labs for one week, I can see why people don't do so well in this
> class.  So I'm going to spend a lot of unpaid time totally rewriting
> the course materials; as a teacher, I can't ignore the mess that these
> poor kids would have to struggle through.

I'm sure you'll do great, having experienced your pedagogical skills :-)

> As a result, I'm reducing my lilypond time to 1 hour on weekdays and 2
> hours on weekends+holidays.

As long as this doesn't affect your grumpiness and efficiency, I'm
happy with that! And I'm sorry for not being as available as I wish
(here we're in the middle of a major national campaign, but in about
two weeks things should settle down a lot).

Cheers,
Valentin