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Re: Coexisting 2.8 with 2.4


From: Graham Percival
Subject: Re: Coexisting 2.8 with 2.4
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006 10:54:31 -0700
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 (Macintosh/20060516)

Fairchild wrote:
Many have invested extensive effort in creating quality scores with various
versions.

The "guidelines for writing lilypond files" section of the manual
attempts to mitigate this.  By writing lilypond files carefully, you can
reduce the problems associated with upgrading versions.

 To encourage upgrading there should be some automated mechanism
for upward compatibility, or earlier versions should be supported.

The string replacement capabilities in convert-ly are useful, but far from
adequate.

Additional support for older versions requires more effort.  There are
three reasons that people work on lilypond:
1)  Getting paid for a specific features.  (see the "sponsoring" links)
2)  Solving a personal problem (ie if I were a programmer and were
annoyed by a bug, I could fix the bug and send my patch in).
3)  Contributing due to a vague sense of owing something to the
community.  (such as basically all my doc work)

You might argue that all the developers have an obligation to maintain
the input syntax (under #3), but Han-Wen has always been clear that the
input format may change from time to time.  In addition, Erik has been
working on a system which avoids the problem of the changing input
syntax.  This should be available in lilypond 2.10.


Having just updated from 2.4, perhaps you could help to fill in this documentation. According to these docs, the only change that convert-ly cannot handle between 2.4 and 2.8 is the \markup issue and utf-8 characters. I'm sure that there are more problems than that, but I don't know what they are.

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.9/Documentation/user/lilypond/Updating-files-with-convert_002dly.html

The TEX and DVI back-ends are more or less unsupported. Why would you want
the DVI.

** Point-and-click and convenient preview from jEdit.

Point-and-click now works for ps, and I believe even pdf. I don't know how this fits in with jEdit.

Cheers,
- Graham




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