One of my main goals for the past two years has been reducing the amount of "oral tradition" in lilypond development. Knowledge of the internals, techniques for debugging, and our policies have been explained in bits and pieces in emails, which makes it hard for beginners to get started. This led to our beloved Contributor's Guide.
I've shied away from directly tackling large policy questions. Partly because these tend to spawn discussions with a huge noise-to-signal ratio, partly because we've survived for now without such a mechanism, and partly because I thought that other stuff were more urgent. However, a couple of independent occurrences over the past few months has convinced me that it's time to bite the bullet and tackle these questions. I wish I could say that we could do this without negatively impacting GLISS, GOP, or development in general, but of course I can't. This *will* suck time and energy away from productive areas. But I think (hope?) that clarifying/deciding some of these questions will be good in the long term (say, 1-3 years from now). With that in mind: - I'm making an agenda for these questions. We'll do this in an organized fashion (think GDP for those of you who were around in 2007/8). - the tentative plan is to introduce one question each week, but it might slip to one every two weeks. Most of these questions are not terribly urgent, and I think this will help to minimize the negative impact on productive work. - deciding to postpone any decision is always an option. - decisions (including "postpone this") will be recorded in Contributor 11 Administrative policies - some questions (typically "should person X get git push access?") will be discussed privately by senior developers on the lilypond-hackers mailing list. This is nothing unusual in the open-source world; it will follow the pattern of subversion-private, freebsd core, debian-private, etc. The list of members of this group will be public. (this list hasn't been used for a few years, and I'm currently in the process of finding out who's on it, and adding new people who should be there -- don't worry if you haven't been contacted yet but think that you should be on this list) - nothing starts until 2.14 is out I'll probably post the list of questions next week (I want to spend time working on 2.14 now); if you want to add anything, just email me. I know this message is fairly devoid of content, but I wanted to let people know that yes, we *are* working on a way to settle (or at least clarify) our policies. Including code style. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
