Re: Can you give a sample ETF file? and other questions

[Valentin Villenave]

On 6/14/20, Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> wrote:
> That's how I stumbled on etf2ly. There are no regression tests and I
> couldn't find a single ETF file across the Net to see how the script's
> output looks like. Can anyone provide one?

You can find a bunch of those online, for example here:
http://www.igracemusic.com/hymnbook/hymns.html

ETF is still one of the valid formats on WIMA and IMSLP, and it was
quite readable until 2005 or so.  That may seem like ages ago to you
and me, but have a chat with a librarian and you’ll hear otherwise.

> ETF is Finale's former exchange format, which they deprecated in favor
> of MusicXML. Finale can no longer export to ETF starting from Finale
> 2007. It's still able to import ETF though. Perhaps etf2ly could go to
> the trash...

Why? It hardly costs us any resources (the most activity it has seen
in a dozen years is when Jonas got it Python3-compatible a few weeks
ago).

As part of MR !157, I even found a link that’s still alive to replace
the one in the current header:
https://www.gnu.org/software/lilypond/src/Developers/Details/etfformat.html

>  From a general point fo view, it would be helpful to have some context
> about the scripts. Which of them do you think are the most widely used?
> Among those, musicxml2ly is obviously the most helpful, but I don't
> quite know about the others. The ABC format looks still active, and the
> Score extension in Wikipedia supports it through abc2ly, but I'm unsure
> wether it's frequently used.

Not being free, ETF may reach a point where it’ll be _only_ readable
through etf2ly.  That would be unfortunate as we’ll obviously never
actively support etf2ly again, but that would still be considerably
better than nothing.

If you want to remove any part of LilyPond that isn’t actively
supported or used, you’ll find a *lot* of outdated cruft we could do
without.  (Hell, we could even export our fonts once and for all in
OTF and get rid of MetaFont/MetaPost altogether!)  But that’s one of
the upsides of Free Software: not having a commercial target to meet
or shareholders to answer to, we can bear with things on a much longer
timescale (which is how I’m writing this very message with a recent
Firefox build on a 1999 laptop, btw).

That’d be my point of view, at any rate.

Cheers,
-- V.