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

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

I'm sorry for saying this; it was too harsh.

That said, I am confused. I thought the purpose was to "stabilize"
syntax. But at the same time, I read in another mail, that you would
like to consider writing all music functions with a / prefix rather
than \.

How can I interpret that as 'stabilising'? It is a large change that
will invalidate almost all existing files, will have interactions with
existing parts (/ is not unused), and will probably have repercussions
we only understand after it's been rolled out for some time.

As far as I can see, putting the syntax up as subject for discussion
has generated lots of suggestions along the lines of "let us throw
away what we have and start from scratch", often without any clue of
how to do this on a technical level.

> 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?

Part of my beef with the GOP mediated discussion here is that just me
and David have a grasp of how things work. Get more people
knowledgeable and there can be discussion.

> 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?

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen