Re: critical issues

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 10:23:28PM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > This was the result of between 25 to 40 emails in August 2011 on
> > lilypond-devel.  A quick scan didn't reveal your name amongst
> > those emails, but we simply cannot afford to revisit every policy
> > decision every six months because somebody didn't notice or wasn't
> > interested in the previous discussion.
> 
> The labels are not all that interesting to me.  If we don't have
> developers or users interested in working seriously on or with certain
> proprietary platforms, then there is no point in calling those platforms
> supported and stopping the release process for those platforms that
> _can_ be considered supported.

We could certainly consider dropping support for OSX or windows.
That would eliminate 80% (or more!) of our user base, including
everybody who works on our documentation, plus certain extremely
valuable developer like Carl... but I suppose that, logically
speaking, we could consider it.

I am against that idea.

> > If you are aware of any other issues which fall under the
> > definition (i.e. a reproducible failure to build lilypond from
> > scratch,
> 
> On a supported platform.  It does not look like there is currently much
> sense in calling MacOSX or Windows that.

The exact details of the proposal specifies "as long as configure
reports no problems", which presumably would fail on osx (unless
it was highly tweaked) or windows.

> > an unintentional regression, or something which stops a good
> > contributor from working on lilypond),
> 
> That's urgent.  But it is not release-relevant since good contributors
> don't work on released versions but on the development version.  I also
> see no point in delaying a stable release because of details that are
> not actually worse than at the previous release.

I understand your point of view.  However, that was not the
decision that we reached during that GOP discussion, and I am not
interested in re-opening that discussion.

Bottom line: I will not be calling anything a "stable release", or
even a "release candidate", if there are issues which are known to
fall under the current definition of a "Critical issue".  I am not
open to changing that definition for at least the next 6 months.
However, lilypond is open-source software; there are no legal
barriers[1] to other people building binaries and distributing
them under whatever name they wanted[2].

[1] other than trademark law.
[2] common practice in open-source software is to release "forked"
software under a different name than the original to avoid
confusion, but I doubt that this is a legal requirement.

Cheers,
- Graham