developer newsletter

[Graham Percival]

In the past few months, we've had a number of developers being
surprised at some of the build system changes.  The changes (not
just the input/ deletions) *were* announced in advance, but it's
easy to miss emails on a large list like -devel.  When a proposal
goes out and nobody answers, it's difficult to know if people
aren't replying because they thought it was obviously ok, or
because they didn't see the message.  This is troubling.

In the past few weeks, I've noticed that I spend about an hour a
day reading the lilypond lists and writing "organizational"
emails.  That's fine for me, since I want to keep an overall view
of everything (although I tend to skim+delete any programming
talk).  But this isn't ideal for somebody wanting to do 5-10 hours
a week... just keeping up to date could take all their available
lilypond-voluteer time.  This is troubling.


I'm therefore thinking about writing a weekly developer
newsletter.  It would have a summary of large discussions, a
section for important proposals, and a week later, a section for
the results of those proposals (i.e. either "being implemented" or
"was rejected for reasons XYZ").

I expect this to take up to 5 hours to set up, followed by up to 1
hour a week for each issue.  Once it's going, it would be
relatively easy to pass the job to somebody else if there was a
volunteer.  Do you think it's worth it?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from "non-full-time"
developers: people who have time now and again.  Would such a
newsletter help you?

Cheers,
- Graham