Re: Which Linux distro for Lilypond

[David Kastrup]

Thomas Morley <address@hidden> writes:

> 2017-01-07 10:57 GMT+01:00 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>
>> Now obviously I am not all too well-suited as a role model for
>> communicating with Guile upstream.  I'm just not the kind of man Stephen
>> Turnbull is (who has more or less single-handedly deflated the animosity
>> towards GNU in XEmacs, while having had more than enough personal
>> setbacks to keep it going.  And RMS has not really been the greatest
>> help in that endeavor).
>>
>> But either way, I don't see that the project can do without
>> communicating with Guile, and better than I managed doing.  Even if we
>> end up forking Guile 1, we want to do so in a manner where incremental
>> improvements of Guile developers remain feasible/possible.
>
>
> You probably know about
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2016-11/msg00031.html
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-12/msg00041.html
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2017-01/msg00003.html
>
> Regarding all the bugreports I listed there (probably with impact to
> lilypond usinf guilev2) and the amount of replies to my posts I'm
> pretty much frustrated.

That's three mails from your side.  It takes a Guile developer 2 minutes
to glance over them and shrug his shoulders if he's not in the mood.  At
the same time, you wait and are impatient for days on end.

So your level of frustration is not proportional to the level of Guile
developers not caring.

With electronic media, getting those levels even somewhat related is
pretty hard.  When I started submitting patches to LilyPond, I got so
frustrated with nothing happening that communication became very heated
and bitter and in the end I asked for commit access in order _not_ to
have to communicate with LilyPond maintainers.

This proposal was discussed privately (in my opinion reasonably so)
among a few LilyPond developers, the results being both that I was
granted commit access, and that Valentin quit working on LilyPond
because he considered the kind of informal private communication and
decision-making in limited circles contrary to the spirit of a community
project.

So long story short: it's very easy to get frustrated at the level of
response from a project for problems which are disproportionally
important as well as urgent to you while being actual real problems of
the project itself.

Making people care is not a one-time effort.  It is easier to do in
personal communication.  If anybody wants to take that up: FOSDEM in
Brussels is up in a few months and sports a Guile developer room and
birds-of-a-feather sessions, and there are still open slots I
understand.

Social engineering does not just concern criminal activities.

> I already had the vague thought how much work it might be to explore
> other scheme-dialects, adjust whole lilypond to use them and drop
> guile entirely.

I think that forking Guile-1.8 would be much more likely to be
successful.  There is just too much in terms of Guile structures and
concepts going on to make such a transition feasible without several
high-level experts on low-level programming and the Scheme dialect in
question successful.

-- 
David Kastrup