Re: lilypond progress

[David Kastrup]

Arne Babenhauserheide <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Harm,
>
> I see your input, but I’m comparing this with how it looked like 5 years
> ago: I could not even compile my own songs anymore with Guile 2.x
> installed.
>
> First for the most important part I see in your mail:
>
>> And we still may be dropped from major distros or lilypond with guile2
>> is offered, which may give us bad reputation.
>
> This choice is much, much better than before. The choice before was "I’m
> losing Lilypond!" (and not much of a choice).

No, the choice was "I need to use the installer provided on LilyPond's
web page".  Frankly the only feasible choice for users on Windows and
MacOSX for the last ten years, and we have a _strong_ followership
particularly among Windows users.

But for developers, waiting for the next installer is not an option.

> The non-stability for your larger score is something to fix, but it is
> something which can actually be addressed systematically

How?

> and no longer a roadblock users cannot cross without losing all
> ability to compile their music. And it is something which hits people
> who might actually have the skills to fix it (those who embedded
> scheme in the lily documents).

That's far too optimistic since many expressions provided to LilyPond
functions are delivered in "embedded Scheme" (every occurence of # in a
LilyPond file causes the Scheme reader and interpreter to run) and
besides, much of the core functionality is defined using "embedded
Scheme" as well, making it just as crash-prone as user-defined code.

-- 
David Kastrup