Re: stepping down as project manager

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Hello Graham,

Many thanks for the amazing amount of energy and work you've put in
over the years.  You certainly brought a very new style of leadership
to the project after I have left. I hope we can count on you to stick
around to give comments in the role of experienced emeritus.


On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 9:01 AM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> I guess it's time to make it official: I'm stepping down as
> project manager.  I'll stick around for a while to review patches
> on countdowns and participate in policy discussions, but don't be
> surprised if I'm gone for good in a few months.
>
> It's been quite a ride for the past 9 or 10 years (depending on
> which cvs commit is deemed to be my first contribution).  I've
> gone from making trivial typo corrections, to organizing a
> directory of snippets, to reorganizing the whole documentation, to
> recruiting+training 20 doc editors over a single year, to building
> the binaries, and finally to trying to organize the team of
> developers.  Over that time I've studied or worked at 5 different
> university on 3 continents.  But nothing lasts forever; the time
> has come to leave.
>
> For most of 2012 I haven't been doing much with LilyPond, and in
> the past few weeks I've been doing even less -- but I find that I
> don't miss it.  I've made some good friends while working on
> LilyPond, and Waltrop was great.  I was really fired up about
> LilyPond when I left.  But sadly the warm feelings from that
> meeting vanished rather quickly, and I was left feeling even more
> jaded than I had earlier in the year.
>
> Ultimately, I haven't used lilypond for my own music since 2004.
> I was hoping that I could get fired up about my old pieces if I
> could create a final version with a nice stable syntax, but that
> hasn't happened.  After I'm finished my phd, I'll do the thing
> which every computer science student should do at least once in
> their life: I'll make my own language.  I'm not comfortable with
> the level of abstractions that lilypond offers.  Just like
> different programming languages make it easier (or harder) to
> write certain types of programs, a different sheet music language
> would make it easier to express the type of music that I write.
> I'll write a python script which transforms a text file into a .ly
> file.  There's a number of things which can be done with text
> manipulation which will allow me to write music in a simpler
> fashion.  I'll make the resulting script available under a Free
> license, of course, but the most important thing is that I'll be
> "scratching an itch" as the saying goes.
>
> Other than that, I'll be spending my time on other volunteer
> projects, either in the audio domain or scientific computing such
> as scipy or eigen.  I think it would be good to challenge myself
> with some hardcore DSP or numerical software programming, as both
> areas tie directly to my probable research or job work.
>
>
> So what's next for lilypond?  There's no immediate rush to change
> things.  At some point somebody should clone the github lilypond
> repositories, but that's not a big deal.  There's a mountain of
> miscellaneous tasks that I do and can't remember, so I guess that
> over the next few months I'll send emails to -devel whenever I
> discover something that needs to be done.  I don't mind passing on
> advice or whatever I can remember to people taking on those tasks.
> The most immediate issue is building releases, but Phil's doing
> that.  The most important thing is to have a new GNU
> co-maintainer.  I feel a bit bad about dropping out only a few
> months after officially taking on that position, so I'll keep on
> doing it for the next few months.  It would be great if somebody
> stepped forward for this -- start off by working on the known
> problems with our GNU compliance, and we'll see how things
> develop.
>
> The schedule for me leaving isn't at all fixed, but I imagine that
> I'd be ok with spending 1-2 hours a week for months or even years
> to come.  The most important thing would be to keep it easy to
> participate meaningfully with only a small amount of time.  The
> key to that are the patch countdowns and policy ideas coming as a
> formal proposal.  Not to brag, but I really think that the 2011
> summer GOP proposals were ideal.  Topic were scheduled usually at
> least a week in advance, proposals were on the web, a draft
> existed for a week, then a firm proposal for another week.  If
> there was significant disagreement, the discussion was extended
> and/or the policy was scrapped or rewritten.
>
> I'm not going to be reading -devel in detail, but if I knew that I
> could check my mail (or a webpage) once a week at a regular time
> to see a well-written proposal, I'd be happy to discuss it.  I'm
> not the only senior developer with waning interest or time for
> lilypond; I think that such an arrangement could help keep all
> those people slightly involved in lilypond.  However, I'm not
> going to be the person doing such organization any more.
>
> We've had a number of people recently warning about less energy
> for LilyPond, so I know that this email isn't perfectly timed.
> But hey, that's life.  The next few months probably won't be
> fantastic, but as long as you reduce any expectations, I don't
> think it'll be too bad.
>
> All the best,
> - Graham Percival
>
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-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen