Hi JanPeter,
<snip>
One thing that concerns me with lilypond at the present is what I see
as a sort of balkanisation of code. We have LSR, OLL, and people
making one-shot GIT repos, and it's all very fragmented. I don't think
this is good for newcomers, and splitting like this is never good for
open source projects. I can see the arguments for all these ways of
making add-ons for lilypond, but it worries me. Yes, LSR is for
snippets and exemplars, not necessarily for full blown code as OLL is,
but lately there has been a lot of the latter in LSR that I feel could
be in OLL.
Balkanization is of concern to me as well. Although in the past, I was against having a Lilypond stackexchange be official, my recent experience with TeX stackexchange has caused me to wonder if we should make an "official" LilyPond stackexchange to replace the user list. But this may be a thread hijack.
And then there is this sort of impedance mismatch balkanisation - I
think OLL should be a feeder into lilypond core, but it appears this
may never happen. I'd like to promote that idea more. One example
comes to mind: \shapeII. I have hammered this to a high degree in
thousands of uses in hundreds of pages of scores over the years. Yes
there is a small corner case bug or two with it, but nothing stopping
it going into lilypond I think. It's probably the function I use in
lilypond more than any other one. In other words, purely from my
experience, I think it is pretty well tested and would be a good
candidate for inclusion. Some of the pedal work that Harm and I did
ought to be in lilypond also I think. What I am saying is that I see
OLL as a long term incubator for lilypond features. Just a couple of
ideas from me.
If \shapeII is production ready, then I'm OK with adding it. But is should NOT be named \shapeII when it goes into core. It should be something like \shapeControl. \shapeII reflects the history that it came after the creation of \shape. \shape might even be better, but since we have code out there that uses \shape but is not \shapeII compliant, we can't really use \shape.
Thanks,
Carl