Hi fellow ponders, it would appear that my excursion into a regular workplace ended up somewhat shortlived. Long story short, I was not able to convincingly make a weekly commute, part home-office, and very Windows-centric workflows (and using rather unflexible version control) and a focus on shortlived code (rather than the multiple-decade timespan projects that LilyPond, TeX, and Emacs sport) combine with a competitive amount of immediately visible productivity.
This was actually not as much an opportunity I had myself actively sought out but rather an interview a friend of mine had arranged because my finances were not really working out with LilyPond. I don't quite know where to go from here, so I'm pretty sure to be around at least for February back in the Pond, and I'll probably take a look at what options we have to divert donations through the FSF. They take a 10 percent cut, but they also handle credit card processing and other stuff, and of course there would be no need to notify people in case I left again: the project obviously could somewhat comfortably revert to making use of money independently in order to pay for some long-standing coding projects. Of course, going via the FSF and a project-specific fund would mean that we would need some sort of mechanism to actually decide what to use the money for. I have been not overly successful in providing regular accountability to my personal supporters, so it remains to be seen how I would fare with more visible requirements to reports. While my short excursion into more regular work places has provided a short breath of relief financially, those were also offset by a number of acquisitions made both for immediate needs connected with having to maintain two households as well as making some long-required or desired acquisitions not previously deemed affordable. The long and the short of it is that I'll not be able to, say, hold out half a year until other financial arrangements catch hold. And I don't really have a view on how much of a positive difference routing part of LilyPond financing through the FSF could have. So for the short time range, I am again dependent on support by other LilyPond lovers. Sorry for turning on dime again here. So what's next on my agenda? Finishing some started work that was more or less stepped in mid-stride by my excursion into the regular workplace. One somewhat long-standing goal was to remove LilyPond's own implementation of a Rational data type and replace it by one based on Guile's arbitrary-precision arithmetic. This is a multistep endeavor. Step 1 is putting the data structures of the Midi backend under Guile garbage collection control (so far, they are just allocated in C++ and never released. It doesn't make much of an impact because the Midi data is so much less than what is used for visual typesetting, but it's disconcerting a bit). This is necessary because various timing data is stored in the Midi data structures, and using Guile rationals for that requires tieing the data structures into Guile's garbage collection. Next step is making all musical Moment data structures (optionally tied into Guile/SCM already as Simple_smob) and the occurences of the Rational data type (so far not tied to Guile at all) properly garbage-collected. Then the Rational data type needs to be replaced by a C++ wrapper for Guile's SCM data type (in order not to have to rewrite a lot of code, the Rational data type itself and its conversion functions would likely remain but be reimplemented in terms of Guile arithmetic). That would likely cater for most problems of becoming arbitrary-precision (with "arbitrary" actually meaning a few million digits). For the overwhelming number of scores, this should not make much of a difference. I expect a bit of performance impact. But nothing comparable to the Guile 2 transition (if and when we go that route eventually). With regard to Guile 2, we'll need to figure out a viable programming and communication strategy and also decide whether we rather make Guile 1.8 work privately for us. That will also have an influence on deciding how to progress technically with our MusicXML support. I am glad that I'll be able to provide technical support and expertise at least for a while and thus hopefully help Graham pick up the reins of the overall project governance a bit better. At the very least, I'll be able to get a bit on my ongoing work queue flushed out which was left in a dissatisfactorily unfinished state by my departure and which would likely have taken half to a year to clear in most parts while having a regular main job. And, of course, this is an opportunity to try putting out the 2.20 release finally. I'll take stock of how to deal with our showstoppers in that area soonish if Graham does not beat me to it: it's one of those tasks which have so many open ends that I easily lose focus, and much of it is trying to figure out the status of previous unfinished contributions from others, something I am notoriously bad at. At any rate, I'm back for a while to comment on stuff and to get work finished and, depending on how LilyPond's financial future and targets work out (and your possibly private support of my work), perhaps even for longer again. If and when I take up applying for work positions, I'll likely do so in closer vicinity to my home, possibly reducing the amount of commute problems and the level of exhaustion I have to deal with. But at any rate, I hope to be on board at least for making LilyPond 2.20 a thing. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
