how to make decisions? (was: [GLISS] differentiating pre/post/neutral commands)

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Sep 03, 2012 at 01:24:22AM -0300, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Graham Percival
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > The meta-target is "after spending 5 years very publicly
> > telling people *not* to talk about changing the syntax because
> > we would do so 'in a year or two', I think I should encourage
> > such discussions.".  I mean, people trusted me when I said
> > that there
-snip- 
> Whatever you have been saying in the past is irrelevant.

Yes, I'm definitely getting that impression.

As you may recall, I launched a proposal to discuss GLISS:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2012-07/msg00639.html
You replied with a single email:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2012-07/msg00786.html
Discussion continued: "there seems to be fairly broad support for
_some_ form of standardization":
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2012-07/msg00874.html
The final proposal was posted:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2012-08/msg00191.html
with no substantial disagreement.

That proposal became:
http://lilypond.org/~graham/gop/gop_4.html


I don't know where to go from here.  I spend a lot of effort
trying to organize such discussions, because I think that LilyPond
is a community project.  I think that we should encourage people
to participate, but telling people "ok, thanks for your work on
XYZ, now get lost while the real developers talk about ABC" might
discourage people from working.

The idea behind having an explicit policy proposal, following by
at least two updates of the proposal, is to allow everybody to see
just what is being considered and to have lots of time to make
objections.  If some people ignore the later proposals (especially
the one marked "final") and then object a month later, the whole
process becomes a total waste of time.

Granted, some people might see this as a good thing.


That's what I want to find out now.  Is there any point to having
policy discussions in the form of GOP ?  If not, then how else
should we organize ourselves?

One of the neat things about Waltrop was seeing a range of
developers and users.  Some people were very concerned about
Baroque music; others preferred pushing the boundaries of paper
notation (and even going beyond static notation into video!).
Some people ate meat, some people drank alcohol, some people were
devoutly religious, some people were atheists.  Some people
organized crowd-sourcing of a book of vocal scores; some people
write algorithmic music with "write-once, read-never" ly files.
Some people wake up early, some sleep in.  Some people work on
converters to/from ly and musicxml, some people worked on
online/realtime score generation.

The LilyPond community has some shared values, some opposing
values, but an overall interest in the specific code base called
"lilypond".  How can we work on that together, while respecting
our individual differences?  How can we encourage and keep
ourselves motivated to improve LilyPond?

- Graham