State of the pond

[Graham Percival]

We have a new release candidate, slower development, highlights on
development problems, and a vacation.


RELEASE CANDIDATE

As always, this means:

- activity on master goes on as normal.

- nobody touches the release/unstable branch, other than
  translators, who may merge with that if they want to and don't
  break anything.
  The question of whether translators have a stable branch or not
  is a separate matter and has nothing to do with the release
  plans.  It's just a question of how the translators want to
  organize themselves.

- when I say "nobody touches the release/unstable branch", I mean
  it.  There will be no new features, no ordinary bugfixes, no doc
  changes.

- if there are no Critical issues in two weeks, release/unstable
  becomes stable/2.16.

- if not, I make a new release/unstable based on master whenever
  those Critical issues are fixed.  This will obviously pick up
  any new features, bugfixes, or doc updates that happened in
  master.


SLOWER DEVELOPMENT

Development has slowed to a trickle.  I'm not certain if this is
just because it's late spring (i.e. busy academic time), or if
people are holding their breaths waiting for the stable release
(i.e. not putting forward any major patches), or just everybody
getting older.


DEVELOPMENT PROBLEMS

The lack of interested mentors is a problem.  For example, Luke
has been trying to add a few comments and clean-ups to our code
since Feb 10.
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2310
However, this is a general problem which we've had for years; it's
not going to be fixed any time soon.  And I'm certainly not
pointing fingers here, since I'm not willing to mentor people.

Trying to anticipate future problems, I recalled guile
indentation:
http://codereview.appspot.com/4896043/
My impression is that it would only take an hour or two to fix
this, and then we could standardize all the scheme indentation.
This isn't a theoretical concern; Adam Spiers' first patch
required hours of extra work because of misunderstandings about
our desired indentation.  This strikes me as a fairly juicy piece
of low-hanging fruit.


VACATION

On a personal note, I'm off to Europe from May 8 to 24, seeing
Zurich, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, and Germany (in that
order).  If anybody is in one of those cities and wants to meet up
for a few hours, let me know.

Taking it back to lilypond, all our accommodation is supposed to
have wifi, so I should be able to make releases as normal.
However, if 2.16 turns stable during that time, and if that
release requires unforseen fixes, there may be some problems.


- Graham