Re: lilypond progress

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

David Kastrup writes:

> Arne Babenhauserheide <address@hidden> writes:
>> This choice is much, much better than before. The choice before was "I’m
>> losing Lilypond!" (and not much of a choice).
>
> No, the choice was "I need to use the installer provided on LilyPond's
> web page".

Then let me rephrase: The choice for most GNU/Linux users was "I’m
losing Lilypond", now it is "Lilypond might be slower".

> Frankly the only feasible choice for users on Windows and
> MacOSX for the last ten years, and we have a _strong_ followership
> particularly among Windows users.

That’s good, but for them there never was a problem, right? It does not
matter for them whether Lilypond devs compile for Guile 1.8 or for Guile
2.x

>> and no longer a roadblock users cannot cross without losing all
>> ability to compile their music. And it is something which hits people
>> who might actually have the skills to fix it (those who embedded
>> scheme in the lily documents).
>
> That's far too optimistic since many expressions provided to LilyPond
> functions are delivered in "embedded Scheme" (every occurence of # in a
> LilyPond file causes the Scheme reader and interpreter to run)

This means that the user knows that the embedded Scheme is there, right?
So even if they cannot fix it themselves, they can provide the snippet
which creates the problem. They know where to start.

> and besides, much of the core functionality is defined using "embedded
> Scheme" as well, making it just as crash-prone as user-defined code.

This can be fixed incrementally, too.

I might sound too optimistic. I think that’s needed to provide a new
perspective which can help to reduce the negative bias from the problems
in the past years. Please allow me to provide this as a spark of
happiness and give it a chance to support more positive feelings during
collaboration.

It might still be a few years until Lilypond on Guile 2.x is as stable
as Lilypond on 1.8, but the main roadblocks have been removed: Lilypond
can already compile complex ly files with Guile 2.x

And, from a completely personal perspective: I can build my own songs
with Lilypond again. And that is wonderful!

Best wishes,
Arne