Re: Perception of LilyPond development status

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> Any LilyPond dev who does have a Facebook account might have a look at
> this interesting, although somewhat sad, discussion. I think it gives
> a clear picture of how our current state of development is perceived
> by users:
>
> https://www.facebook.com/groups/gnulilypond/permalink/10157762793383529/

The problem with the "obsolete version of Guile" is that Guile
development is falling apart.  The only person actually working on the
development version of Guile is Andy Wingo.  He does not participate on
the Guile developer list, he does not bother with bug reports, he does
not take input and does whatever he currently is interested in without
communicating it, and frequently breaking master.  What he is interested
in is basically compiler/optimization development.  He is not interested
in fixing the performance and design problems with Guile 2+'s string
implementation and design.  There are about a dozen developers (probably
less by now) cleaning up on the stable branch, but they cannot do
significant independent development since they cannot coordinate with
the development version.

This has been the case for 2.2, and it's more so for 2.3.  I don't see
that there is a viable way for LilyPond to move forward to "current"
versions of Guile which have become completely unpredictable as a target
as well as as a platform.  I think there will not be much of a way
around forking 1.8 and making that work for us as long as no
well-performing string-interface is available that would efficiently
facilitate the C/Scheme string passing density of LilyPond.

Maybe we can coordinate something with Thien-Thi Nguyen who has been
keeping the Guile-1.8 branch tip in the official Guile repository from
bitrot due to Texinfo and language changes.

-- 
David Kastrup