Re: lily 1.4.3

[Mats Bengtsson]

> A few thoughts:
> 
> ... 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.

The idea of the "For new users" entry under documentation is to
collect exactly that kind of information.

<...>

> 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!

The link to the main page for the Windows installer is in the
"For new users" section. From there, you can actually find a broken
link to the Troubleshooting document.

I agree completely that it's confusing to find other links under
Download that point to the directory list of 
http://www.lilypond.org/gnu-windows/. I'd prefer if that one also
pointed to the windows installation instructions.

> 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?)

Short answer: It doesn't really matter who does what, just
send your mails to the mailing lists. 
Anyway: Han-Wen and Jan do most of the hacking, I and several
others contribute with some small hacks but mostly try to be 
helpful on the mailing lists, at the same time nagging Han-Wen 
and Jan about all problems we encounter. You can find the full
personal gallery in the "Authors" document under "Background
Information". It would certainly be great to get rid of some 
of the spam. I don't know what the mailing list maintainer can 
do about it with the current software.

> 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?

Most of the web pages are included in the source code tree and
is being hacked just the same way as the actual source code.
The wikiwiki could be updated by anyone via the web. I'm afraid
that's the part of the documentation that's received the least
attention lately.

> 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.

As far as I know, there are plans for a reorganization of the
mailing lists. There's usually fairly much traffic both on -discuss
and -help. 

> 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? 

For typeset music, you could publish it at the Mutopia web site.
For contributions to the actual program, take a look at
http://lilypond.org/wiki/?LilyDevelopment

> 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?

Well, if you manage to install and setup all the necessary development 
tools you should be able to compile Lilypond yourself, which means it's
easy to add patches. Under Linux, that's fairly straightforward, under
Windows, there's a link on the Windows install web page that describes
the basics of the compilation procedure but I'm not sure how easy it is
in practice.

   /Mats