Am Di., 26. Mai 2026 um 14:40 Uhr schrieb David Kastrup <[email protected]>: > > > Hi, I am currently in a problematic financial situation and job hunting > is not going well. Basically I am at a point where I have no good idea > how to pay rent, medical insurance, and maybe some food. > > Germany does have a social security system but essentially I have come > to a stillstand here because of some family history that leads to me > formally having some amount of money that I am not free to use because > of moral obligations and verbal agreements while my father (now 91 years > old, bodily rather frail, but still publishing research work in the > mathematical foundations of theoretical physics) may need it to cover > health or care costs. > > I am not touching this money; my chances to prevail in court (which > would take at least 1½ years) regarding social securance are somewhat > dim, and if I were to lose, I'd have racked up a lot of debt. As a > result, I am mostly locked out from social security. > > Job prospects are not good at my age, and with my rather mixed CV that > is the result of, well, a really bad ability to keep myself focused on > stuff I am not interested in. > > So what about parts of LilyPond that would be in need of work? > > Far better documentation for programmers (I think some people already > wrote several documents; maybe one should look at integrating them). > > Opening MIDI up to programming/extension in Scheme. Generally cater for > Scheme performers and iterators. > > Making grob properties more efficiently organized than in alists (I am > not sure the potential for savings are here all that high). As part of > that: > > Turn interfaces into virtual base classes providing properties. That > would require stratifying interfaces: a grob could not inherit the same > properties from two different interfaces. > > Stop the explicit distinction pure/unpure and instead trace which > property callbacks access information like the current line breaks, and > cache based on accessed breakpoint-dependent grobs. This would simplify > programming, avoid logical problems, likely speed up processing "unless > you do something imprudent" which would become harder to diagnose. > > Improve parsing and Scheme functions: right now we have \etc being able > to do an astonishing amount of heavy lifting after which you need to > revert to explicit Scheme programming. Some intermediate level might be > nice to have. > > Markup commands are quite less flexible than music functions. And the > relation to markup lists is still iffy. > > Going serious about an extension system (examine what Urs left us with > regarding openlilylib and see how it may make sense to integrate stuff > into LilyPond proper). > > Get rid of Ghostscript for most uses, possibly getting closer to a > framework for live rendering. > > Reopen and reorganize garbage collection now that Guile 2+ and the > Boehm GC and 64-bit architectures are here to stay. > > Now for better or worse, I already spent a number of years with a focus > of becoming more dispensable, and given that I am far worse at getting > myself into doing "grunt work" than many others are, it is a good fit if > I mostly invest work into making it easier for others do cater for > themselves. > > And I am glad that in the past years where I have been very little > active, the C++ code base has solidified, the build system has been well > maintained, the administration has been run well: Colin has been a > fixture in keeping the commit processes well in line, Jonathan has done > marvelous work in connection with Dan to keeping GitLab's automations > running well on multiple platforms (our old processes using Google Code > and SourceForge and whatever else were quite more cumbersome to > developers). > > A lot of rough edges have been taken off, and that really bodes well. > The question is whether there is enough taste for getting some new rough > edges in with a view to making it easier in the long run for people to > get work done with LilyPond and contribute to LilyPond, and whether > there is a feeling that it may be worth enough supporting me for doing > that kind of work. > > I have a somewhat mottled record to be sure. But a number of things > certainly were making headway for LilyPond's future. And for better or > worse, some things I have improved a lot, like the movement of > functionality into music functions, some C++ ways of writing things more > naturally, subproperty overrides/reverts (which were flaky/dangerous to > use for years). > > Even if we still have issue 34. > > Would there be enough people willing to commit to regular payments at a > sustainable scale again that there is a point in me turning to work here > instead of prioritizing other venues (that were not overly successful in > the last two years or so: at age 61 as of next week, finding even > comparatively trivial jobs is not a no-brainer)? > > Thanks for thinking about it! > > -- > David Kastrup > >
Hi David, count me for 50 EUR per month (can't do more atm). Still the same bank data? When to start? Cheers, Harm
