Release news, development news, state of the world

[Graham Percival]

Here's where we stand.


STABLE RELEASE

Almost everybody wants stable releases more frequently.  They
attract positive attention, they get updated docs and bugfixes and
new features into the hands of users, etc.  We had the first two
release candidates back in Sep.  Unfortunately, we've had Critical
issues since then.

http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/list?can=2&mode=grid
There's one spacing regression (found 42 hours ago) which can
probably be fixed easily.  But there's also 3 problems in GUB that
have seen no action for a month or more.

I know that some people tried to work on GUB but found that they
couldn't build it on ubuntu 11.10.  It's just possible that the
regression in gcc 4.6 was to blame... but without any action on
GUB, we don't really know.  Given the lack of interest[1] in
stable releases, I guess that 2.16 might occur some time in summer
2012?

[1] recall that I define "interest" as "people submitting or
discussing patches".


DEVELOPMENT

We've got a series of measures to automate patch-handling; I
estimate that these will eliminate about 90% of regressions that
occur in master.  A quick summary of our new development process
is in CG 1.3 (not online yet).

I'm in the process of cleaning up the CG.

I'm planning a big recruitment drive for new contributors in Jan
2012.  It would be *really* helpful if we got as many "force
multipliers" (i.e. "maintainability" issues in the tracker)
resolved before then.


Cheers,
- Graham