Re: Compact Chord Symbols Patch

[Richard Shann]

On Mon, 2014-10-06 at 20:06 +0100, James wrote:
> Richard,
> 
[..]
> > 
> > Richard
> 
> I have created
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=4154
> 
> I'll help shepherd this patch through via the standard review process
> for this.

Thank you very much. I thought I would follow the instructions for
contributing to LilyPond starting from the top at http://lilypond.org as
I know how useful it is for a fresh pair of eyes to look over stuff like
this. This lead me to the step after creating a patch where it suggested
"if you have a mentor email the patch", but didn't say what one was. So
I improvised at this point and emailed the mailing list. I would have
liked to run the regression tests at that stage, but I think I ran out
of step-by-step instructions.

> 
> Also See:
> 
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/contributor-big-page#commits-and-patches
> 
> if you intend (or think you might want) to make further patches for
> other parts of LilyPond in the future

Well, it is about 10 years since I last had to tweak the actual LilyPond
code (at the time you had to type bass figures in the reverse order),
which far exceeds my memory span for how-to-do-it instructions. I just
manage to keep up with the processes for developing the Denemo LilyPond
GUI.

I would have found this development much easier if I could have avoided
the use of a virtual machine for the actual git part of it (that is, if
I had permission to create remote branches such as dev/compact-chords in
the lilypond repository). Then I would only have needed the virtual box
to compile and run the new version. 
As it is, I had to copy and paste from my virtual box out to the real
machine, merge my changes and copy and paste them back, a process
fraught with danger. (I think the LilyDev must have some way of sharing
file systems but I didn't look into that). If I could have created a
remote branch, modified and pushed back and then switched to LilyDev to
pull the remote branch, compile and test that would have been perfect.

Reading over the documentation you quote it seems that you do have
contributors with the limited permission to create branches, but I
didn't immediately see how to register for that...

Richard