2.15.26 is released, containing the fix for issue 1933 lilypond-book on windows. This marks the end of my active development work for the next ten weeks: until the end of March, I am reducing my lilypond time from 10 hours a week to 5 hours a week. In practice this means that I can reply to emails and review patches on countdowns, but likely nothing else. I can still build releases from time to time, although those are a pain because I need to reboot my computer into a different OS from my normal one.
In terms of my workload, I am quite behind on writing my phd dissertation and in this spring term I am teaching an additional 10 hours of computer labs each week. For professional and personal reasons I need to finish this degree as soon as possible, and lilypond is the only thing I can cut. In terms of hobbies... lilypond has ceased to be entertaining or fulfilling. When things go well I have a feeling of grim satisfaction, but more often than not it is a constant stream of disasters. Every day brings more emails with problems that I have no interest in solving but I somehow feel obligated to work on. I will re-evaluate my situation at the end of March, but I make no guarantees about how I will choose to spend my time from then on. I could end with a plea about getting more people involved, but those rarely do anything and even besides that, we don't really have enough mentoring capabilities to afford any new contributors unless those contributors are highly experienced with open-source development already (such as Adam and Julien). Instead, I will end with a plea for more automation. We collectively need to stop doing things manually, or if any manual attention is needed, foist that off to non-technical users. I'm talking about walking somebody through editing their .git/config, checking a patch by manually executing rm mf/out/* && make && make check, or typing in patch numbers by hand. I really think that the best way forward is to stop all such activities, and instead extend the automatic processes until they can handle those. Thigns like finishing the CG git instructions, making Patchy more reliable, fixing build problems and enforcing stricter limits on errors. If a patch fails to apply to git or fails to compile during a Patchy test, an email should be sent to -devel automatically instead of requiring manual attention. etc. Yes, this might mean that some things get delayed by a few weeks while the automated process is extended to cover that type of patch, but it can save so much time in the long run -- and it makes the "routine maintenance" much less unpleasant. I'm convinced that a few weeks of serious work on automation, instead of new features or even bug-fixes to lilypond, would quickly see great benefits. Anybody who wants push access to the git-cl repo or the lilypond-extra repo will get it. Good luck, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
