Re: state of the release: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

[Valentin Villenave]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 3:39 PM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> In the "avoid losing info" side of things, although I'm cautiously
> optimistic that any *new* info won't be lost, we still have a number
> of lost items from the past few months, and no volunteers to go on an
> archival dig.  I know that archeology isn't as sexy as Indiana Jones
> makes it out to be, but it's still an important job.

On the archeological side, I can probably help. Give me about 3 weeks
and I'll be a /lot/ more available for LilyPond tasks.

> We have 10 issues with patches attached; 3 of them fixing Critical
> issues.  Some people might view this as a positive thing -- hey, we
> have people sending fixes! -- but I'm counting this as "ugly" because
> it means that we're not supporting each other enough.  I'd like to see
> a more effort put towards reviewing and finishing patches.

This is one of the few areas left where we still rely upon Han-Wen a
lot, and do not (AFAICS) a properly-organized team as we (kinda) have
wrt bugs, frogs, docs etc. The deal with David's recent patches show
that IMHO: although nobody really objected with merging his patches
(and although diplomacy is certainly not his strongest point), nobody
really felt that actually committing the patches was their job. (Carl
eventually did, albeit somehow `under the radar' :-)

Which brings up the question of the tools we use:
- Rietveld doesn't allow to keep track of lilypond-related patches,[1]
- [Patch]-marked mails on -devel don't work,
- "Patch"-tagged issued on the tracker don't seem to work either...
It has been suggested in the past (by you) that we could use another
mailing list, either specifically for patches-reviewing, or on the
contrary for all non-patch-related discussions that usually clutter
the -devel list.

[1]: Actually, I believe a *lot* of our problems could be fixed if
Rietveld allowed to display the patches not only by date or by
reviewer, but also by "project" they're related to. A cheaper, but
less convenient solution, would be to have a "Patches" page on the
Wiki, where people could keep a list of the patches they send or
upload -- though I highly doubt this page would be kept up-to-date (in
fact, I'm pretty sure it would not).

> The Contributor's Guide is supposed to handle the initial training of
> helpful people (or, at the very least, separate the seriously-helpful
> from the non-seriously-helpful)... but this doesn't help when certain
> parts are out of date.  Anybody feel like working on this?  If not, it
> can wait until I'm preparing for GOP -- but that means turning away
> genuine offers of help for development tasks for the next 2-4 months.

I've been reading (actually, discovering) the CG over the past few
weeks, and I have to say it seems quite complete and up-to-date to me.
Unfortunately it seems most people prefer to be told what to do
instead of RTFCG.

> We're in better shape than we used to be, but LilyPond development
> still sucks in many ways.  I'm now estimating 2.14.0 to be six months
> away.

Well, remember when we were waiting for 2.12? "Any year now", as Mats said :-)

On a personal note, I'm sorry for not having been more available this
year. I can't wait to work on LilyPond again!

Cheers,
Valentin.