Last 2.18 release preparations.

[David Kastrup]

We'll try running 2.18.0 out on December 28.  There are several things
that need doing till then: Documentation/included/authors.itexi needs to
get updated.

    git shortlog -s origin/stable/2.16..origin/stable/2.18

should give the current list of committers (38 is more than I expected,
actually), but one still needs to sort them in categories.  Leaving off
the "-s" option from the above command might be helpful for that.

The announcement needs to get written (I'll try my hand at it).  Our
parallel compilation problem (issue 3674,
<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3674>) will
likely severely impact the acceptance of 2.18 into distributions.  My
guess is that we are talking about bad/incomplete dependencies in the
fonts, leading to corrupted font files that on some platforms cause
LilyPond to abort.  If anybody would find a conceivable culprit, this
would definitely make many of us happier.

We have a few known problems that will only see a fix in 2.18.1 (like
the speed regression under Windows) since the respective problem fixes
are just too invasive to go out untested without appearing in a
development release.  I'll try drafting a list.

There are also a few changes that can still be cherry-picked into the
stable branch, but I'll go through them myself.

I am aware that this is likely a somewhat busy time for some...  It
would still be great if we could manage this.

-- 
David Kastrup