stepping down as project manager

[Graham Percival]

I guess it's time to make it official: I'm stepping down as
project manager.  I'll stick around for a while to review patches
on countdowns and participate in policy discussions, but don't be
surprised if I'm gone for good in a few months.

It's been quite a ride for the past 9 or 10 years (depending on
which cvs commit is deemed to be my first contribution).  I've
gone from making trivial typo corrections, to organizing a
directory of snippets, to reorganizing the whole documentation, to
recruiting+training 20 doc editors over a single year, to building
the binaries, and finally to trying to organize the team of
developers.  Over that time I've studied or worked at 5 different
university on 3 continents.  But nothing lasts forever; the time
has come to leave.

For most of 2012 I haven't been doing much with LilyPond, and in
the past few weeks I've been doing even less -- but I find that I
don't miss it.  I've made some good friends while working on
LilyPond, and Waltrop was great.  I was really fired up about
LilyPond when I left.  But sadly the warm feelings from that
meeting vanished rather quickly, and I was left feeling even more
jaded than I had earlier in the year.

Ultimately, I haven't used lilypond for my own music since 2004.
I was hoping that I could get fired up about my old pieces if I
could create a final version with a nice stable syntax, but that
hasn't happened.  After I'm finished my phd, I'll do the thing
which every computer science student should do at least once in
their life: I'll make my own language.  I'm not comfortable with
the level of abstractions that lilypond offers.  Just like
different programming languages make it easier (or harder) to
write certain types of programs, a different sheet music language
would make it easier to express the type of music that I write.
I'll write a python script which transforms a text file into a .ly
file.  There's a number of things which can be done with text
manipulation which will allow me to write music in a simpler
fashion.  I'll make the resulting script available under a Free
license, of course, but the most important thing is that I'll be
"scratching an itch" as the saying goes.

Other than that, I'll be spending my time on other volunteer
projects, either in the audio domain or scientific computing such
as scipy or eigen.  I think it would be good to challenge myself
with some hardcore DSP or numerical software programming, as both
areas tie directly to my probable research or job work.


So what's next for lilypond?  There's no immediate rush to change
things.  At some point somebody should clone the github lilypond
repositories, but that's not a big deal.  There's a mountain of
miscellaneous tasks that I do and can't remember, so I guess that
over the next few months I'll send emails to -devel whenever I
discover something that needs to be done.  I don't mind passing on
advice or whatever I can remember to people taking on those tasks.
The most immediate issue is building releases, but Phil's doing
that.  The most important thing is to have a new GNU
co-maintainer.  I feel a bit bad about dropping out only a few
months after officially taking on that position, so I'll keep on
doing it for the next few months.  It would be great if somebody
stepped forward for this -- start off by working on the known
problems with our GNU compliance, and we'll see how things
develop.

The schedule for me leaving isn't at all fixed, but I imagine that
I'd be ok with spending 1-2 hours a week for months or even years
to come.  The most important thing would be to keep it easy to
participate meaningfully with only a small amount of time.  The
key to that are the patch countdowns and policy ideas coming as a
formal proposal.  Not to brag, but I really think that the 2011
summer GOP proposals were ideal.  Topic were scheduled usually at
least a week in advance, proposals were on the web, a draft
existed for a week, then a firm proposal for another week.  If
there was significant disagreement, the discussion was extended
and/or the policy was scrapped or rewritten.

I'm not going to be reading -devel in detail, but if I knew that I
could check my mail (or a webpage) once a week at a regular time
to see a well-written proposal, I'd be happy to discuss it.  I'm
not the only senior developer with waning interest or time for
lilypond; I think that such an arrangement could help keep all
those people slightly involved in lilypond.  However, I'm not
going to be the person doing such organization any more.

We've had a number of people recently warning about less energy
for LilyPond, so I know that this email isn't perfectly timed.
But hey, that's life.  The next few months probably won't be
fantastic, but as long as you reduce any expectations, I don't
think it'll be too bad.

All the best,
- Graham Percival