Re: Thinking about putting together a grant to support development onLilyPond

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 02:14:49PM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> If one can put together a good roadmap.  But in this case, the "let's
> put up a front for collecting money for David" angle is insufficient.
> There is a considerable amount of planned work to do by different
> people.

Agreed.  I suggest reducing it to the following:

1) pick a specific work, or body of works, which are
unquestionably in the public domain.  A Dvorak string quartet?
Beethoven piano concerto?  Bach chorales?  Something already in
mutopia?

(actually, I quite like the mutopia angle, since then nobody needs
to spend time typing in a score)

2) set up a kickstarter to "perfect" that score, where "perfect"
means "work on lilypond such that good output is produced with
only semantic information".  No tweaks, no workarounds, etc.

Somebody (probably David) would need to look at the .ly input,
look at the current output, enumerate the problems and estimate
how much time would be needed to fix those, and put the
appropriate price tag on the kickstarter.

3) repeat with a different score.

I suggest starting with "easy" scores -- i.e. no grace note
problems, maybe just piano-only, etc.  After 2 or 3 short + easy
scores have gotten funding and been delivered, those involved will
be in a much better position to estimate more complicated scores.


However, the kickstarter should make it clear that this is NOT an
official lilypond project.  This is a private agreement between
people funding it and those offering to work on it (presumably
David, but maybe a few more people).

- Graham