Re: Perception of LilyPond development status

[Jacques Menu]

Hello David,

Maybe this is totally stupid, but would it be meaningful to pick a Guile 2 
version, fix the issues in string
implementation and design, and freeze that fixed version for Lily’s own use, 
without depending on Andy Wingo’s work for some time?

JM

> Le 14 déc. 2019 à 22:58, David Kastrup <address@hidden> a écrit :
> 
> 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
>