Re: Release news, development news, state of the world

[David Kastrup]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> writes:

> Graham Percival writes:
>
>> At the moment, the top 3 problems for publicity that I see are:
>
> Okay, now we're getting somewhere.  I would like to add a top
> reason
>
> 0. we don't really have a clue what LilyPond's priorities should be,
>    and where our individual priorities lead us

That's actually the same thing as a lack of publicity.  The current set
of developers seems mostly be driven by their individual agendas and
have no free capacities for covering that of others.

There are some secondary motivators: some people want to be proud of
Lilypond, some want to promote free software.  But mostly they want to
get work done.  I am somewhat exceptional in that my principal
motivation is getting work done, but crappy tools annoy me to a degree
that most of the time, I end up working on tools rather than workpieces.

I want to work on accordion music, but that is lousily supported.  So I
want to write Scheme code in Lilypond's extension language Guile for it,
but _that_ is lousily supported as well.  So I work on parser, C++ and
whatever else in order to get to a state where I can work on programming
in Scheme without getting in a bad mood in order to get to a state where
I can work on accordion music without getting in a bad mood.  And
working in C++ puts me in a bad mood, so you could say I am fabulously
bad at working on my own agenda.  But at least I don't have a bad
conscience about what it does to Lilypond.

In any way, the mark of publicity is that it garners excitement in
people that _don't_ yet have exhausted their capacities.  And when we
have enough of them, it makes sense to talk about what Lilypond's
priorities should be, because only then will it actually have an effect
of what people work on.

>> 1. no prospect of stable releases due to GUB problems, and nobody
>> working on them.
>
> So, there is no active developer who wants stable releases.  Great, no
> stable releases, then!

Emacs has had a period of about five years or so without stable releases
at one time IIRC (most serious distributions shipped a package
"emacs-snapshot" eventually in order to satisfy their users, a practice
which seems to have down again), and it turned out to cause a trickling
away of interest and fresh blood.  I think that the target clientele of
Lilypond that we can hope to muster for our purposes is quite less
geeky, and quite less likely to be comfortable compiling their own work
environment.

> Okay, so no-one wants more help or more users, everyone is fine with
> the team and user base as it is.

It rather sounds like those remaining interested in Lilypond have their
hands full already.

So a recruitment drive does not seem like the worst idea.  We need to
get our multipliers going again.

-- 
David Kastrup