Re: google summer of code

[David Kastrup]

Łukasz Czerwiński <address@hidden> writes:

> 2012/2/10 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>> Don't get me wrong: it is probably quite enough work for getting someone
>> started.  I'm just not sure whether it will be easy to sell it off.  The
>> largest part of the work would realistically consist in digging oneself
>> into sparsely documented areas, just in order to be able to come up with
>> a good plan and implementation that would, if you discounted all dead
>> corners, take two days to do.
>>
>> It seems a bit like visiting a term of art classes in order to make a
>> convincing sketch at its end.  The real deal is not the sketch, but the
>> ability to do so.  And if all you are going to do is that one sketch,
>> the exercise seems a bit pointless.
>>
>> But of course, if you want to turn sketches into a living, having
>> someone pay what it takes to do the first sketch is going to be a _big_
>> help.
>
> Like Janek, I'm also thinking of participating in GSoC. If one of us
> works on that bug during GSoC and moreover while coding also adds some
> documentation to the poorly commented code, this will result in far
> more than "one sketch", because we will stay connected with Lilypond
> after the end of GSoC 2012.
>
> If you think that Issue #34 is too little for GSoC, you could add to
> that some other similar issues with MIDI or grace notes in a form
> similar
> to: http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2011/Ideas#Project:_KStars:_Improve_the_
> observation_planner_and_logging_feature

I was just thinking of a story I wanted to share in this context.  In my
high school days, I was in some sort of school band.  I played
electrical guitar, another one (with a classical guitar education I
believe) bass, I somehow managed to get the son of a resident music
school director to play drums, and we had a flutist who had just changed
from recorder to "regular" flute and was rather fond of experimenting
around.

Not much came off that, but the flutist kept the first "real" piece we
had been doing in his repertoire for quite a while.

Now fast forward a dozen years, and the younger brother of the flutist,
the unmusical brother, calls me.  The flutist is getting married, and
the younger brother has the idea that at his wedding, he'll play that
old first piece on the flute.  It is my job to write down the notes (it
would be nice to put in some LilyPond angle in here, but in truth I just
wrote them by hand on notepaper) and to play the guitar.  I write down
the notes (still know them by heart more or less) and start thinking.

Several phone calls and letters later it turns out that the drummer is
living in Ireland by now, but will be in Aachen because of a friend's
wedding.  So if we organize a drum kit...  The bass player is living in
Munich, but considers the gag worth his trouble to drive a whole day
just to make an entrance, if we are getting him a bass guitar for the
occasion.  I actually still have my own guitar, so I'm the one actually
playing on original material.

Three days before the wedding, the brother makes his first appearance at
my house.  He has taken the notes to a friend playing flute, and has
been working for close to half a year getting the scale he needs into
shape.  Rhythm and interplay are all wrong.  After the first day, he got
the rhythm more or less right.  After the second day, we are playing
this together smoothly and I stop worrying about this becoming a total
catastrophe.  On the third, he starts improvising solos.  It was like
high school all over again.  "Unmusical" or not, it was obvious which
family he was from.

On the wedding, I made some sort of lame speech, put the flutist (who
can play pretty much everything) at the bass and picked up the guitar,
then we started, and I stopped, saying "that is not good.  Take the
drums instead, I think I have a bass player here."  Who actually arrived
just 20 minutes ago, having been stuck in traffic almost all the way, so
we had no real practice together.  The same game with the drums, and we
had the original drummer pick up the drums instead, and gave the flutist
a flute.  His brother was doing the PA stuff all the while (actually,
that was stuff he was good at in his youth as well), and was now holding
the mic for his brother.  And then the same "that is not good.  Take the
mic instead, give the flute to your brother".  Of course everyone knew
that the flutist was being led on all the while, but nobody had a clue
just where.  And the brother stood there with a puzzled look at the
flute while the flutist now held the mic, while we others played the
intro.  And then the brother played.

A few days after the wedding, he handed back the borrowed flute and
stopped doing music again.

It was pretty much the "single sketch" equivalent, but it was something
that a lot of people won't forget.  It was totally silly but worth doing
for some reason, and a number of people put in their smaller (but still
considerable) contributions of letting it happen.

-- 
David Kastrup