Re: sustainable development in LilyPond

[Trevor Daniels]

Graham Percival wrote Tuesday, August 03, 2010 3:31 AM

> As you might recall, I gave a talk at RMLL 2010 
> about sustainable development in F/OSS.

Nice talk.  It prompted me to think about my own involvement
with LilyPond.  I volunteered for doc development due to
the guilt pressure at the start of GDP, IIRC.  I continued
because I enjoyed it, spending around a year working
several hours most days on the LM.  Eventually pressure of
other things which I'd been neglecting caused me to back off,
and recurring RSI prevents long sessions at the keyboard,
so now I do little more than keep in touch :(  

On the main point I can see two dangers to sustainability.

1) There is no architectural overview and no program logic 
manual to guide new developers through the early stages.
This has the advantage that only experienced and expert
coders able to deduce the design from the source code are
able to contribute significantly, ensuring high quality.  But
there are very few such people, and it is conceivable the
number might decline to zero at some point.

2) There is no overall design plan to guide future development.
New features are added in an ad hoc fashion at the whim of 
individual developers.  The danger is that the overall 
structure will lose coherence, properties will increasingly 
behave in inconsistent ways, and the complexity of the user 
interface and the barriers to new developers will increase.
At present we rely on Neil and other core developers to
maintain the integrity of the design by reviewing patches,
but that is not guided development.

We have an opportunity within GLISS and GOP to tackle these
dangers, although their terms of reference would need to be
widened to embrace them.  GLISS would need also to consider
future needs and how they would be accommodated in the
input syntax, and GOP would have to break down the barriers 
which new developers currently have to overcome themselves.

Trevor


Trevor