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Re: Beginning contributor needs mentor


From: Urs Liska
Subject: Re: Beginning contributor needs mentor
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2015 22:17:13 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.3.0


Am 10.11.2015 um 21:47 schrieb John Gourlay:
> Mike,
>
> Yes, I am the spacing-a-line-of-music John Gourlay, pleased that my early 
> contributions have turned out to be useful. I’ve been out of the loop for 
> about 30 years, however, so it won’t happen that I’ll be doing any mentoring 
> myself for some time. Indeed I’ve been working in Windows for the past 20 
> years or so, usually very close to the machine, helping in the development of 
> real-time software for testing engines and transmissions used by the big auto 
> manufacturers at the ends of their assembly lines. Only now that I’ve retired 
> from that job do I feel like I have time to give back to the open-source 
> community. I only learned about LilyPond about two years ago from Daniel 
> Spreadbury who tracked me down hoping to get some of the unpublished MusiCopy 
> reports. (Of course I can make them available to you, too, if you like.) He 
> was working for Steinberg in England on a new music scoring application and 
> wanted to use some of the ideas from the MusiCopy project. As we conversed he 
> pointed out that the ideas are already in use in a number of music formatting 
> systems including LilyPond. Unfortunately I’ve never heard that the Steinberg 
> product was released. 

Well, they are still on their way towards an initial release, see
http://blog.steinberg.net/ for Daniel's very informative development
reports.

> So, where do I go from here? If you have a narrow, low-priority bug or new 
> feature for me to work on it could help me focus my attention. 

My perspective may not be representative but two different topics spring
to my mind (just rushing forward to get some attention before others
with more important issues step out ;-)

There is one topic that might be interesting, although it's not
necessarily narrow - but with prepared ground. One part where LilyPond
would deserve some care is its tie formatting. Janek Warchoł who has
unfortunately more or less dropped out of work (due to a "real life"
job) has invested quite some work in the research and preparation of a
"tie crusade" (see http://lilypondblog.org/2013/07/lilypond-tie-crusade/
and http://lilypondblog.org/2013/08/tie-crusade-round-2/). This may be
interesting as it is a challenging task but very rewarding and
(hopefully well) prepared.

Another issue is maybe a really tiny but also rewarding issue.
I got stuck in my first attempt at a patch in the C++ domain when I
tried to make the selection of alternative notation fonts significantly
simpler. The road block was in an external dependency (fontconfig) but
nevertheless it might be something small enough to get "into it".

But of course it might be more promising if some of those people step
out who are active (and knowledgeable) in the C++ domain.

Urs

> I certainly need to spend more time with the Contributor’s Guide; the 
> messages on lilypond-devel are mostly inscrutable to me, and I don’t know 
> anything yet about the tools used to track bugs, fixes, reviews, and 
> releases. Separately, I feel like I ought to learn more about using LilyPond 
> so that I can better understand new feature requests and judge whether or not 
> a fix is appropriate. Regardless, I’ll take whatever suggestions you’d like 
> to make to help me get started.
>
> John
>
>> On Nov 10, 2015, at 10:53 AM, Mike Solomon <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> Wait wait wait, are you THE John Gourlay?
>> As in "Spacing a Line of Music" 1987 John Gourlay? If so, you should be 
>> mentoring us, not the other way around! I think I've cited you in every 
>> paper I've ever written about notation.
>>
>> I'd love to help you get started. It is your algorithm at the heart of 
>> LilyPond's horizontal spacing engine, so that can be a place to start if 
>> you're up for it!
>>
>> Cheers,
>> ~Mike
>>
>> PS If you're not the John Gourlay of which I speak, my offer for help still 
>> stands!
>>
>>
>>
>> Sent from my Samsung device
>>
>>
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: John Gourlay <address@hidden> 
>> Date: 10/11/2015 5:36 PM (GMT+02:00) 
>> To: address@hidden 
>> Subject: Beginning contributor needs mentor 
>>
>> I’m an aspiring LilyPond contributor who needs a mentor. How can I get one?
>>
>> So far I can compile LilyDev itself and the documentation, and I’m becoming 
>> familiar with git. I’m looking at the LilyPond Contributor’s Guide, but I 
>> have to admit that it’s a bit overwhelming. I’m a recently retired software 
>> engineer highly experienced with C++, less with Unix and open-source 
>> development, and not at all with Scheme. I’m not a musician, and I’ve used 
>> LilyPond only for toy examples so far. However, I once knew a lot about 
>> using computers to engrave music, as I was the principal investigator for 
>> the MusiCopy Project at Ohio State University in the 1980s. I’m sure that 
>> much has changed since then, but I’m pleased to say that LilyDev looks to be 
>> very much like what MusiCopy might have been if we’d had an opportunity to 
>> complete it. I’d like to help further the LilyPond project in some way.
>>
>> John Gourlay
>> _______________________________________________
>> lilypond-devel mailing list
>> address@hidden
>> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
>
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