I guess it's time to make it official: I'm stepping down as project manager. I'll stick around for a while to review patches on countdowns and participate in policy discussions, but don't be surprised if I'm gone for good in a few months.
It's been quite a ride for the past 9 or 10 years (depending on which cvs commit is deemed to be my first contribution). I've gone from making trivial typo corrections, to organizing a directory of snippets, to reorganizing the whole documentation, to recruiting+training 20 doc editors over a single year, to building the binaries, and finally to trying to organize the team of developers. Over that time I've studied or worked at 5 different university on 3 continents. But nothing lasts forever; the time has come to leave. For most of 2012 I haven't been doing much with LilyPond, and in the past few weeks I've been doing even less -- but I find that I don't miss it. I've made some good friends while working on LilyPond, and Waltrop was great. I was really fired up about LilyPond when I left. But sadly the warm feelings from that meeting vanished rather quickly, and I was left feeling even more jaded than I had earlier in the year. Ultimately, I haven't used lilypond for my own music since 2004. I was hoping that I could get fired up about my old pieces if I could create a final version with a nice stable syntax, but that hasn't happened. After I'm finished my phd, I'll do the thing which every computer science student should do at least once in their life: I'll make my own language. I'm not comfortable with the level of abstractions that lilypond offers. Just like different programming languages make it easier (or harder) to write certain types of programs, a different sheet music language would make it easier to express the type of music that I write. I'll write a python script which transforms a text file into a .ly file. There's a number of things which can be done with text manipulation which will allow me to write music in a simpler fashion. I'll make the resulting script available under a Free license, of course, but the most important thing is that I'll be "scratching an itch" as the saying goes. Other than that, I'll be spending my time on other volunteer projects, either in the audio domain or scientific computing such as scipy or eigen. I think it would be good to challenge myself with some hardcore DSP or numerical software programming, as both areas tie directly to my probable research or job work. So what's next for lilypond? There's no immediate rush to change things. At some point somebody should clone the github lilypond repositories, but that's not a big deal. There's a mountain of miscellaneous tasks that I do and can't remember, so I guess that over the next few months I'll send emails to -devel whenever I discover something that needs to be done. I don't mind passing on advice or whatever I can remember to people taking on those tasks. The most immediate issue is building releases, but Phil's doing that. The most important thing is to have a new GNU co-maintainer. I feel a bit bad about dropping out only a few months after officially taking on that position, so I'll keep on doing it for the next few months. It would be great if somebody stepped forward for this -- start off by working on the known problems with our GNU compliance, and we'll see how things develop. The schedule for me leaving isn't at all fixed, but I imagine that I'd be ok with spending 1-2 hours a week for months or even years to come. The most important thing would be to keep it easy to participate meaningfully with only a small amount of time. The key to that are the patch countdowns and policy ideas coming as a formal proposal. Not to brag, but I really think that the 2011 summer GOP proposals were ideal. Topic were scheduled usually at least a week in advance, proposals were on the web, a draft existed for a week, then a firm proposal for another week. If there was significant disagreement, the discussion was extended and/or the policy was scrapped or rewritten. I'm not going to be reading -devel in detail, but if I knew that I could check my mail (or a webpage) once a week at a regular time to see a well-written proposal, I'd be happy to discuss it. I'm not the only senior developer with waning interest or time for lilypond; I think that such an arrangement could help keep all those people slightly involved in lilypond. However, I'm not going to be the person doing such organization any more. We've had a number of people recently warning about less energy for LilyPond, so I know that this email isn't perfectly timed. But hey, that's life. The next few months probably won't be fantastic, but as long as you reduce any expectations, I don't think it'll be too bad. All the best, - Graham Percival _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
