Re: lily 1.4.3

[William R. Brohinksy]

A few thoughts:

First, I had no shame or offense-taken with regard to Mats responding
with quotes from my email to him to the list. I just hadn't understood
the way things were supposed to be done. This is the beginning of a
running-request for cleaning up the lilypond.org pages, by the way. It'd
be nice to have some text that helps the new lilypond-treader to find
the right footsteps, as it were.

Second, (and by no means is anyone to have known this) I go by Ray or
raybro, and never have liked the brainless way that emailers have of
calling me William, just because that's my legal first name. I only
mention this because of the lag I suffer recognizing when I'm being
addressed by William these days 8^)

Third, I really hadn't realized that the cygwin Lilypond version was in
such an early stage of development: Again, my fault. There is little
enough differentiation made between the cygwin Lily and the linux Lily
that I got confused: much of what I'm doing is not unlike what Laura
Conrad is doing. Now that I know that it's not right, but not
particularly earthshaking news, that python is missing a whole .dll, I
can look at what I'm doing in an entirely different light: I had thought
I could get lilypond 1.4.2/3 up and work around its foibles to get
printed output for proofreading (as I'd done with the
windows-nearly-native 1.3.41), without slamming any of the doors or
driving it over 15kph. Instead, I need to look at it as an alpha
release, and approach it the way I did AmigaTeX, Deluxe Music 2.0 for
amiga, and other programs I've betatested. An entirely different mindset
and suite of tools, more interesting because I'm just breaking into
cygwin (which may also be more alpha than beta!)

This is ok, I just get dense and need to be told from time to time.

To get back to the running-request, the lilypond.org pages are quite
confusing to the windows user. Starting from the root page
(www.lilypond.org), it is possible to end up in different locations,
getting different ideas of who is developing which for what hardware,
depending on which links you take. It's almost non-deterministic!
Additionally, there are pages that have been listed in the -discuss list
that I cannot find a linked path to from the www.lilypond.org home. For
instance, on 
http://www.lilypond.org/development/Documentation/windows/out-www/installing.html
is a link to 
http://www.lilypond.org/development/Documentation/windows/out-www/Troubleshooting
Windows
which is a broken link. However, as listed 
> 
> Yes.  There's list of commands near the bottom of
> 
>     http://lilypond.org/wiki/?TroubleshootingWindows
in the quoted original message. This one works, and I've been here
before. In fact, using the list of commands is where I first figured out
that I had as much of 1.4.2 working as I did...why that changed, I can't
answer, though. While it's very nice to know that this page exists (and
to have it bookmarked) I just can't find a path to it from the home
page!

Now, I have a few questions, to help me get a good idea of how things
are being done. I know Jen and Han-Wen are developing lilypond on cygwin
and linux. Can you guys give us an idea of how things are split up
between you? More importantly, or at least additionally, how do you
acquire those portions of the lilypond dist that are downloaded by the
setup.exe? Is Mats the maintainer of the mailing list? Or just an
Incredibly Helpful Person? (And is it possible to filter the mailing
list to eliminate the commercial spam from digests?)

Who is actually running the web site, and how much of wikiwiki (which
may be a wonderful tool, but on a cranky 28.8k line is a very unweildy
way to get information) is really necessary to survive? Should website
bugs be reported to this (these?) mailing lists?

Is it necessary/desireable to be subscribed to all three mailing lists,
since it seems that just about everything is crossposted to
gnu-music-discuss? Or is there a separate purpose for the three that
isn't really being adhered to at the moment? (For instance, a lot of
help is asked for on -discuss, and -help doesn't seem to get much
traffic at all, from what I see in a few days of being subscribed to all
three). -discuss currently seems to be the main hub of activity.

If I come up with a test script or .ly file that I think is pertinent,
should I just fling it on the mailing list (where someone even newer
than me to lilypond, if that's possible, might grab it and use it and
find that it does Bad Things) or is there a specific person (or persons
for different aspects of Lily/cygwin/etc) to throw it at? 

And finally, for info's sake, do patches work on cygwin, and if so, can
someone give me a pointer to how to use them, just to save a little
time?

I really do appreciate that the lists are here, and manned by people who
are so willing to help out. Even more do I appreciate that Lilypond
exists, and that people are developing it who are so open to users! I
don't mind being a gropo betatester, in fact I enjoy it! So this is
going to be fun, even if I have to put off Real Work for a while.
(Honestly, it removes a tremendous amount of frustration and tensions!)
I _do_ have every intention of using Lilypond for my arranging and
transcriptions, simply because This Does What I Wanted: makes printed
music (yes, beautiful printed music!) without that darned mouse!!

raybro