Re: stepping down as project manager

[Janek Warchoł]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 3:50 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Funny that you mention that.  I was talking about the situation
>> with my oldest friend (now a professional programmer for the past
>> 11 years).  He couldn't believe that I was spending so much energy
>> arguing with people who argued against project requirements on the
>> basis of the current implementation.
>
> There is a fine line between arguing on the basis of the current
> implementation, or arguing on the basis of the current _design_.
> Replacing arbitrary choices by other arbitrary choices is not progress.

I think that Graham raised a very important subject here: it's
important that we (developers as a whole) not only know what is being
changed in Lily, but also *why* it's changing in this way and not
another.
In this case, my understanding is that David was arguing against some
recent proposals because they would make it hard or impossible to
achieve corehence of design.  Unfortunately, from what i see Graham
understood that David is arguing on the base of implementation (i.e.
"no, because we already wrote it the other way").  This seems to me to
be a serious misunderstanding.
Unfortunately, David seems to be the only active developer that
understands some parser subtleties - in other words, only he fully
knows the whys.  Explaining these whys to other devs again and again
obviously can be frustrating for David, but as i wrote in another
thread (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2012-10/msg00413.html)
i don't see any better way :(

best,
Janek