Re: sponsorship offer: Lyric fixes (GSoC, etc.)

[David Kastrup]

Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> writes:

> Agreed. Lilypond is still the best tool out there for my needs. I just
> wish I could do more, and more beautiful, engraving with a smaller
> investment of time and effort. (Isn’t that the eternal quest?)

Well, there is the related quest of making it a smaller investment of
time and effort to teach LilyPond to do more beatiful engraving with a
smaller investment of time and effort...

Ultimately, people have only one life to acquire and perfect skills, and
there is a distribution of skills and interests over the populace.

There is very little overlap between high-profile programmers and
high-profile composers and high-profile musicians.  And there is not all
that much availability of high-profile programmers in any given project
anyway, and one problem with high-profile programmers, probably more so
than high-profile whatever elses anyway, is that you cannot fit all too
many of them into one room before getting irreconcilable differences.

Cough cough.

So it's a good idea to steer projects in a direction where high-profile
skills are only needed one at a time and in moderation, to better match
the statistics of contributors.

I like how Emacs has managed to get less scary to users and programmers
not really scraping the bottom of its barrel.  It still contains a lot
of terrifying depths though.

I keep being annoyed at how complex some stuff is to do with LilyPond.
Even if sometimes the stuff itself is fairly complex by its nature.

If this were better, it would be much easier to load off work for money,
both with regard to typesetting as with improvement tasks.

-- 
David Kastrup