Re: Lilypond code/feature freeze for 2.12

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:09:05 +0200
"Valentin Villenave" <address@hidden> wrote:

> 2008/9/21 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
> 
> > Let me put it this way: when you read an announcement of a new
> > release in some other software (say, audacity or freeciv), how
> > much do you want to read?  My guess is less than a page of text.
> > The current release is two pages.  It definitely shouldn't be
> > longer.
> 
> It didn't seem so long when I first read it. In fact, I like to read
> changelogs. A good (IMO) example is the recent announcement for VLC
> media player:
> http://wiki.videolan.org/What_is_cool_in_0.9/

I have to admit that a quick glance at the linux audio announce
mailist shows many multi-page messages.  However, our past two
release announcements were relatively short:
http://lilypond.org/web/announce-v2.10.html
http://lilypond.org/web/announce-v2.8.html

I don't think we should go above 6 items under "New Stuff".  And
IMO the first three should be the collision avoidance, GDP, and
translations.  If you can pick 2 or 3 other features, go ahead and
write a few sentences about them.  But I think that if you start
seriously trying to pick out cool new stuff, you'll have a hard
time finding only 3 -- we either draw the line here, or throw in
10 more "new stuff" items.

> > WTM does "X new features" mean?  I mean, is vertical collision
> > avoidance one "feature", and pointAndClick{On/Off} another
> > "feature"?  This is a completely vacuous phrase.
> 
> Yes, that what's cool about it :-)
> If you used to read distributions release announcements like I do,
> you'd see what I mean.

I've read plenty of release announcements, but my reaction is
different -- marketing make feel greasy and icky.  I had five
years of training to be as precise as possible in my analytic
philosophy degree; I hate empty phrases like "50 new features".
Come to think of it, maybe you should be writing the notes after
all.

> > It might be good to prepare a "STFU newb and read the News" page
> > on the wiki, though.  That way you can just paste the link to
> > there, instead of wasting time writing paragraphs and paragraphs
> > of helpful text for each frequently asked question like you
> > normally do.
> 
> Yes, John and I are planning to work on the Wiki soon (even if the
> word "soon" has lost most of its meaning to me lately).

Don't *work* on the wiki, since wikis are worse than useless.  :)
I'm just saying that you should write two FAQs:
- "this command is broken" (see convert-ly)
- convert-ly is broken on OSX

If we'd finished GDP months ago and had begun a GWP, these would
be in the official FAQ (and most of the current questions in the
FAQ would be gone).  But since we didn't, they aren't.

Cheers,
- Graham