Re: 2.18

[David Kastrup]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> We should have at least two more development releases for the
> fine-polishing before forking stable.  That gives us four weeks, and
> most things of some substance should be done in the first half of
> that.  Two things I consider important for 2.17.17 are the
> strokeadjust changes for PostScript output, and the vertical rest
> positioning.  I am working on the strokeadjust stuff, and the rest
> positioning really needs as much feedback as possible regarding
> correct behavior in the standard staff case, and desirable behavior in
> the tablature and drum staff cases.

We also seem to have no end to skyline/positioning problems cropping up.
I don't see a chance of a reasonably final solution in the next half
year.  What I would _like_ to see is skylines being used as a fallback
whenever a stencil does not have explicit dimensions (namely, I'd like
to see a way to set the dimension pair to #f in order to let skylines
take over).  That would offer nice backward compatibility and a
reasonably understandable user interface: give a stencil explicit
dimensions, and it does not look inside for further information.

At any rate, 2.18 can't aspire to be the finishing line for the skyline
code design, or we won't see it this year and likely not next year.

So what we need instead is working out a reasonable snapshot, meaning
that any remaining bug fixes in that area should try to be on the boring
side and not a demonstration of skills and genius that is likely going
to blow up on us after the stable release.  We want to avoid the "two
small steps forward for some problems, a giant leap backwards for
others" effect.

-- 
David Kastrup