Re: Release news, development news, state of the world

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 11:36:06AM +0100, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Graham Percival writes:
> 
> > Well, I personally don't care.  If somebody wants to work on
> > advertising, or even better, work on things which encourage other
> > people to do advertising for us, they're welcome to do so.
> 
> Now, that's interesting.  Doing a stable release is *much* work,
> you probably know that.  IIUC, a major reason for doing more
> of that *much* work, is getting positive attention.

I don't care about the positive attention; I just listed that as
one benefit of a stable release that people might care about.  All
*I* care about is having a smoothly-running development process,
and regressions are very not-smooth.  When features that used to
work suddenly stop working, it's really demotivating.  If we could
avoid+fix regressions without ever having stable releases, I'd be
happy with that option.

If we could somehow avoid regressions, there would be two
benefits:
1. very low-cost stable releases.  (the only thing holding up
releases are regressions, so if that barrier is gone, we could
have monthly stable releases with no more effort than it takes me
to make weekly devel releases)
2. developers don't see their hard work from X months or years ago
get spoiled by newer work.

> > At the moment, the top 3 problems for publicity that I see are:
> 
> Okay, now we're getting somewhere.  I would like to add a top
> reason
> 
> 0. we don't really have a clue what LilyPond's priorities should be,
>    and where our individual priorities lead us

Sure we do.
GOP 7: we treat developers as individual volunteers.  Links to
those discussions are here:
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.15/Documentation/contributor/gop_002dprop-7-_002d-developers-as-resources

(planned)
GOP i: roadmap of future development
"here's a really vague plan, since our development effort changes
drastically from month to month"
http://lilypond.org/~graham/gop/gop_20.html

During that discussion, we might have a swell of support for the
idea of being more organized, but I doubt it.  GOP 7 was pretty
firmly against that idea, and nothing I've seen since then
suggests that opinion has changed.  I mean, we can't even get a
bug squad working for 20 minutes a day -- just look at how many
"issues to verify" we have waiting for attention!

> > 1. no prospect of stable releases due to GUB problems, and nobody
> > working on them.
> 
> So, there is no active developer who wants stable releases.  Great, no
> stable releases, then!

That's pretty much the point of the initial email in this thread.

> > 4. no rss feed, no automatic twitter announcements, no google+
> > announcements, etc.
> 
> Okay, so no-one wants more help or more users, everyone is fine with the
> team and user base as it is.

Umm, have you missed my work on automating patches and fixing the
CG lately?  I want to make sure that we treat *current* developers
fairly, before trying to recruit new ones.  We've lost a *lot* of
potential effort from Trevor, James, Phil, Colin, probably Adam,
etc.

Cheers,
- Graham