6 -> 8 change summary?

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> 
> Anyway, long story short, I haven't been keeping up with Lilypond 
> development, 
> but Graham Percival has made me aware that I need to be ready for some pretty 
> big changes.
> 
> I'm wondering if there's some sort of consolidated changelog that shows what 
> will be required to support the new format.
> 
> I know about <<chords>> already.  Are most of the changes relatively simple, 
> or am I looking at a fundamental restructuring of the entire export 
> algorithm?

I suspect that what comes out of RG will be pretty straightforward, so
I don't expect big changes -- we're stabilizing towards a stable
1.8. Version 1.8 is intended as a end-of-life release for the 1.x
series. We plan to make some drastic changes in the syntax for 2.x ;

* << >> will become < > and the current < > will become
\simultaneous { } (or perhaps << >>).

* Coupled with this is a change in the working of \relative. Chords
(<..> in 2.x) will take the current behavior of simultaneous music (
<..> in 1.x), and relative octaves for \simultaneous { } will be
similar to current sequential.

* removal of old-style texts markup (^#(italic "blah") ) in favor for
new-style markup (\markup { \italic blah } ).

When exporting from a program, I expect that these changes are minor,
and that it is feasible to support both version at the same time.
However, the 1.8 to 2.0 transition for existing .ly files can not be
done automatically in general.

In summary: I don't think there need be any worries.



-- 

Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |   http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen