Re: ideas for Google Summer of Code

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

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Am Freitag, 16. Januar 2009 schrieb David Kastrup:
> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
> > A full list of possible projects is on the google issue list;
> > there's something like 300 open issues.  Now, everybody has their
> > pet projects, but IMO a SoC shouldn't be directed at
> > instrument-specific tasks like accordian or gregorian notation.
>
> I beg to differ.  

Me, too. 
First, it's up to the student to suggest a project. We can only give some 
suggestions (and in the end select the students based on their project 
proposals).
And second, considering the complexity of LIlyPond, I doubt that a project 
that tries to tackle a hard core feature/problem of LilyPond (like the part 
combiner) can really be successful. The SoC is meant to bring new participants 
to the projects, so typically students are not yet familiar with the internal 
workings. I think it would simply take too long to understand all the 
internals of lilypond before one can start some serious work on such projects. 

> A rewrite of an intricate module intertwined with the bowels of lilypond
> is not something I consider realistic in this setting.  You need someone
> with good code knowledge to achieve that, and not just for mentoring.
> If the code is transparent enough that you can analyze and rewrite it in
> three months, it would likely have been done by old hands already if
> there is indeed a need.

I beg to disagree here. There are several issues in LilyPond, which can be 
fixed in less than three months (partcombiner, vertical page layout). However, 
our main problem is that we all have daytime jobs, so even if it would only 
take something like a week of full-time development, it would take us 
something like a month.

Cheers,
Reinhold
- -- 
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Reinhold Kainhofer, address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org
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