Re: RFC

[Heikki Johannes Junes]

On Sat, 10 Apr 2004 01:25:29 +0200 Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> Jan and I are trying to get more people involved in the development.
> What do you think (as a lilypond contributor) of the following "job
> advert" text?
 
If nobody is being payed, could it be called "contributing advert"?

> There are plenty of ways to get into the THANKS file, for example, by
> taking care of documentation, bug reports, releases, etc.  We have
> compiled a list of tasks that we would love to be helped with. Have a
> look to see if there is something for you!

What about more verbose text: "There are plenty of ways to get into the list of
contributors, namely the THANKS file, ...", which would concentrate on the
ideas, not on the code.

> * The learning curve is too steep

A comment: I've seen critisism of the stability of the LilyPond syntax. One
reason for the steep learning curve is that the syntax is in a constantly
changing state.

One task would be to prove the LilyPond syntax and declare the parts of it as:
    1) stable: i.e. proven, 
    2) testing: i.e. not proven, syntax may still be improved, 
and 3) unstable: i.e. reserved for developers, testers, and temporary use.

Such distinction would make it easier to make programs which rely on LilyPond.

> We have a roadmap, sort of, which is to implement the following
> features for the next major release:
> 
>  * support for font-encooding like latin1, cyrillic, etc.

What about aiming at unicode? 

> BUILD MANAGER
> 
> The responsibility of the build manager it is to make sure that binary
> packages of LilyPond are available for all platforms.
> 
> To this end, the build manager
> ...
> * tries to find people that will build LilyPond packages for other
> platforms, either for releases or from CVS.

A slightly modere goal would be to have all the LilyPond dependencies included
to the distributions of the vendors, such that all the packages that LilyPond
needs in order to be build could be found in the base distributions.

If one wants to increase the number of people who compile the source, the
dependencies of the source are
a) either included in the base distributions of the main distributions
b) or offered to be downloaded from lilypond.org (or from a given link).

> * tries to convince vendors (Fedora, Mandrake, etc.)  to put lily in
> their base distributions.

IMHO, once LilyPond takes off, the customers will demand LilyPond to be included
to the distributions :) 
 
> An example of excellent bug-reports is the bug-collection of Werner
> Lemberg, see for example
> http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2004-03/msg00138.html

This example is missing an/the expected behaviour.

> * Submit pot files to the translation robot, and update the
>   translations in CVS.

I would like to include/refresh the Finnish translations for LilyPond 2.2. What
should I do?
 
> 
>  Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |  
> http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen 


-- 
  Heikki Junes