13.4.3 Policy decisions

There are a number of policy decisions – some of them fairly important – which we have been postponing for a few years. When GOP begins, we will start discussing them.

Note: The fact that we are not arguing about them right now is not, I repeat not, an indication that we do not feel that these issues are not important. It is simply that if we began talking about them now, it would postpone the 2.14 release for a few months.

Note that the presence of an item on this list does not mean that everybody thinks that something needs to be done. Inclusion in this simply means that one developer thinks that we should discuss it. We are not going to filter this list; if any developer thinks we should discuss something, just add it to the bottom of the list. (the list is unsorted)

Once GOP starts, the list will be sorted into a rough agenda. We will probably introduce one topic each week – yes, it will therefore take months to get through everything, but we must balance productive work vs. policy administration. If we find that we settle questions faster (or slower) than predicted, we will of course change the speed of new topic introductions.

There are some item(s) not displayed here; these are questions that were posed to me privately, and I do not feel justified in discussing them publicly without the consent of the person(s) that brought them up. They will initially be discussed privately on the lilypond-hackers mailing list – but the first question will be "do we absolutely need to do this privately", and if not, the discussion will take place on lilypond-devel like the other items.

In most policy discussions in lilypond over the past few years, the first half (or more) is wasted arguing on the basis of incorrect or incomplete data; once all the relevant facts are brought to light, the argument is generally resolved fairly quickly. In order to keep the GOP discussions focused, each topic will be introduced with a collection of relevant facts and/or proposals. It is, of course, impossible to predict exactly which facts will be relevant to the discussion – but spending an hour or two collecting information could still save hours of discussion.

Note: The estimated time required for "prep work", and the following discussion, has been added to each item. At the moment, there is an estimated 30 hours of prep work and 140 hours of discussion.


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