Future of openLilyLib

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

to begin with, I am of the (biased) opinion that openLilyLib is a
powerful and useful extension infrastructure for LilyPond. There are a
number of versatile and extended ready-to-use packages available, most
notably probably edition-engraver, scholarLY and anaLYsis. But also the
underlying oll-core is versatile and powerful, providing numerous
building blocks without which I would not start any large-scale project
anymore.

I can understand why this view is not shared by everyone, most likely
simply because too much about OLL is obscure or unknown, lacking proper
documentation, although the general introduction at https://openlilylib
.org should be a good start (and there are substantial manuals for the
scholarLY and stylesheets packages, but only in (undocumentedly) self-
compilable form).

At this point openLilyLib is completely dependent on my availability,
at least because I am the only person with knowledge of the basic code
in oll-core. 

For several reasons which I won't discuss publicly I will have to
reduce my availablity to work on openLilyLib (and other stuff) and may
be forced to completely withdraw at any point within the next years.

I would find it a pity if that would mean the end for openLilyLib.
Therefore I'm looking not for a new maintainer but for more people
engaging in the project, to build a community around it that can at
some point continue without my aid.

The aspects needing support most urgently AFAICT are (in descending
order):

 * getting more people familiar with oll-core (using the opportunity to
   maybe improve the coding where appropriate)
 * complete the documentation system in order to make a more complete
   documentation feasible (here the most crucial part is integrating
   consistently scalable score examples in the web site output).
 * getting more people familiar with the coding of scholarLY
 * do maintenance of everything, maybe throwing out some less-than-
   useful packages
 * write a Frescobaldi extension for managing (installing, updating the
   library or individual packages, preparing documents) openLilyLib and
   providing an API for secondary extensions (e.g. an annotation
   editor/viewer or a tool to graphically insert editionMods).

If anything of this looks like your cup of tea you are welcome to
contact me privately or discuss stuff on-list. Of course I am more than
willing to help with any of these tasks.

Best
Urs