Re: Bravura in LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> 2013/12/17 Noeck <address@hidden>:
>> I have to emphasize once more that the real work has been done by
>> Nathan Ho. I just included it to oll. He also wrote the README.
>>
>> Contact with him also showed how LP loses skilled contributors: He
>> didn't get a single reply to his mail about this. That made him stop
>> working on it. Now I stay in contact and he got back his enthusiasm
>> about it, did the update to Bravura 0.7 and wants to go on.
>
> Nathan, i am very sorry about the fact that your email in October
> didn't get any replies.  I saw it back then and was interested in it
> (actually i wanted to include it in openlilylib/snippets myself, after
> trying it out), but i didn't find time to look at it in detail, and it
> kept slipping from my head...  I apologize, and i feel personally
> responsible for your discouragement.  Unfortunately, in LilyPond
> community so many things are happening that it's nigh impossible to
> keep up with everything, and we sometimes forget to appreciate
> contributors for what they do.  I'm sorry about it.

Well, if you take a look at things like
<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3723>, the
amount of feedback is, uh, underwhelming.  It focuses on indentation
(I have to admit, though, that I had forgotten about Werner expressing
his opinion that this is a move in the right direction).

Since the patch series _vastly_ simplifies the grammar while extending
and regularizing its functionality, this is somewhat amusing.  But then
it is not entirely unexpected.

What this boils down to is that most contributors creating particular
functionality first do so because it is most important to _them_.
Particularly when we are talking about first-time contributors, it is
likely that the importance of some feature is strongest felt by
themselves since it even made them cross the threshold from user to
developer.

We had several other projects where pretty much a single person carried
the day, like support for Kievan chant.  Ot certainly takes a lot of
persistence until private projects without particular interest to other
currently active core developers will be integrated in LilyPond proper.

> Thanks for what you did!  It's awesome!  Hopefully now that it's
> included in openlilylib/snippets
> (http://github.com/openlilylib/snippets/tree/master/custom-music-fonts/smufl)
> it won't get lost, and updating it should be simple.

Still needs to be done by somebody.

> I hope that it will be possible to add it to core LilyPond some day,
> but before it'll be possible to do this in a clean way, a few rough
> corners would have to be polished and some (probably major) font code
> refactoring done...

The question is what setup/situation will best lead to this result.

-- 
David Kastrup