Re: Beginning contributor needs mentor

[John Gourlay]

Mike,

Yes, I am the spacing-a-line-of-music John Gourlay, pleased that my early 
contributions have turned out to be useful. I’ve been out of the loop for about 
30 years, however, so it won’t happen that I’ll be doing any mentoring myself 
for some time. Indeed I’ve been working in Windows for the past 20 years or so, 
usually very close to the machine, helping in the development of real-time 
software for testing engines and transmissions used by the big auto 
manufacturers at the ends of their assembly lines. Only now that I’ve retired 
from that job do I feel like I have time to give back to the open-source 
community. I only learned about LilyPond about two years ago from Daniel 
Spreadbury who tracked me down hoping to get some of the unpublished MusiCopy 
reports. (Of course I can make them available to you, too, if you like.) He was 
working for Steinberg in England on a new music scoring application and wanted 
to use some of the ideas from the MusiCopy project. As we conversed he pointed 
out that the ideas are already in use in a number of music formatting systems 
including LilyPond. Unfortunately I’ve never heard that the Steinberg product 
was released. 

So, where do I go from here? If you have a narrow, low-priority bug or new 
feature for me to work on it could help me focus my attention. I certainly need 
to spend more time with the Contributor’s Guide; the messages on lilypond-devel 
are mostly inscrutable to me, and I don’t know anything yet about the tools 
used to track bugs, fixes, reviews, and releases. Separately, I feel like I 
ought to learn more about using LilyPond so that I can better understand new 
feature requests and judge whether or not a fix is appropriate. Regardless, 
I’ll take whatever suggestions you’d like to make to help me get started.

John

> On Nov 10, 2015, at 10:53 AM, Mike Solomon <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Wait wait wait, are you THE John Gourlay?
> As in "Spacing a Line of Music" 1987 John Gourlay? If so, you should be 
> mentoring us, not the other way around! I think I've cited you in every paper 
> I've ever written about notation.
> 
> I'd love to help you get started. It is your algorithm at the heart of 
> LilyPond's horizontal spacing engine, so that can be a place to start if 
> you're up for it!
> 
> Cheers,
> ~Mike
> 
> PS If you're not the John Gourlay of which I speak, my offer for help still 
> stands!
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my Samsung device
> 
> 
> -------- Original message --------
> From: John Gourlay <address@hidden> 
> Date: 10/11/2015 5:36 PM (GMT+02:00) 
> To: address@hidden 
> Subject: Beginning contributor needs mentor 
> 
> I’m an aspiring LilyPond contributor who needs a mentor. How can I get one?
> 
> So far I can compile LilyDev itself and the documentation, and I’m becoming 
> familiar with git. I’m looking at the LilyPond Contributor’s Guide, but I 
> have to admit that it’s a bit overwhelming. I’m a recently retired software 
> engineer highly experienced with C++, less with Unix and open-source 
> development, and not at all with Scheme. I’m not a musician, and I’ve used 
> LilyPond only for toy examples so far. However, I once knew a lot about using 
> computers to engrave music, as I was the principal investigator for the 
> MusiCopy Project at Ohio State University in the 1980s. I’m sure that much 
> has changed since then, but I’m pleased to say that LilyDev looks to be very 
> much like what MusiCopy might have been if we’d had an opportunity to 
> complete it. I’d like to help further the LilyPond project in some way.
> 
> John Gourlay
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