Re: GOP-PROP 4: lessons from 2.14

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 09:00:48AM +0100, Trevor Daniels wrote:
> 
> Michael Welsh Duggan wrote Thursday, June 30, 2011 5:34 AM
> 
> >Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> >>http://lilypond.org/~graham/gop/gop_4.html
> >
> >Could I please ask, for my sanity, that we use ISO 8601 dates?

Sorry, and done.  It was a good lesson in regex in vim.
:'<,'>s/\(..\)-\(..\)-\(....\)/\3-\2-\1/g
the source is in texinfo, so I had to change it there so that it
would be fixed on the website as well.

The list of dates is now *much* easier to read!

> >Oh, and thank you, Graham, for putting so much effort into
> >organizing
> >Lilypond development.  One of the lessons learned IMO, though you
> >may
> >not like it, is that active leaders are necessary to push along a
> >project of this size.

Thanks!  I always worry about pushing too much (for example the
recent "does anybody care about LSR" thread), so it's good to hear
that other people appreciate the organizing efforts.

> Not directly related to 2.14, but the critical issue
> we have is GUB and building GUB binaries.  Correct me
> if I'm wrong, but this procedure is not documented
> anywhere, and only 3 people know how to do it.

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.15/Documentation/contributor/minor-release-checklist
and I stick to those instructions religiously.  If they get out of
date for some reason, I'll fail to make the next release, which
would force me up to update that part of the docs.


admittedly, it doesn't spell out "download the GUB git repo",
which is:
https://github.com/janneke/gub
That's mentioned briefly at the bottom of CG 3.2.2, but that
section is pretty hard to find if you're looking in
CG 11 release work

Also admittedly, only 3 people have ssh access to the server, so
even if somebody else builds the binaries, they can't put them on
lilyond.org.

Finally admittedly, any set of documentation should be considered
completely unproven until somebody other than the initial author
tries to follow them.  So it would certainly be nice if somebody
with a powerful or unused computer (I'm talking "8 hours of 4 CPUs
active" powerful) tried following the instructions.

IIRC both Neil and Patrick have built GUB 1-2 years ago.  There's
some amount of finicky-ness which may stop it working on specific
distributions or CPUs.  We'd like to fix those bugs, of course,
but if you try using it on a linux distro and CPU which is not
exactly the same as me or Jan, don't be surprised if it dies.

Hah, now that I think about it, I'm making releases from the
release-2.14 branch because GUB master is broken on my distro+CPU.
That's a hangup that would certainly snag somebody trying to make
a release!


In short: I'm relatively happy with the level of documentation
about GUB, but I'm not very confident about the code stability of
GUB.  If somebody else wanted to build binaries, they should
budget 10-20 hours of bugfixing before they can reliably produce
stuff.

Cheers,
- Graham