Re: preliminary GLISS discussions

[David Kastrup]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> wrote:
>> David Kastrup writes:
>>
>>>> Maybe the time has finally come to drop convert-ly and implement and
>>>> fully supported conversions using LilyPond on music stream level.
>>>
>>> You still need a parser of the appropriate version at the front end.
>>
>> We have perfectly fine ly parsers of each available version available in
>> executable form from lilypond.org.  What we do not yet have, is a handy
>> or integrated way of dumping the music tree with the original binary
>> [read: a nice web service -- this could possibly be integrated with a
>> mutopia revival, I'll be looking into this] reading the music tree with
>> the current version and a perfect ly-dump function.  Eg, I think we may
>> want to preserve %-comments in the music tree, or other stuff the user
>> does not want to lose?
>
> The tree is not what people want, though?  The tree has no information
> about identifier subsitutions, and you only get the output of each
> music function application.

It is not the preferred form for modification.  Unless its
distinguishing feature is that it works at all and you lack the
expertise for modifying the original source code in a manner making it
work under newer LilyPond versions.

For the users of things like Mutopia, more often than not the desire is
not to see interesting source code, but rather the ability to tweak
paper dimensions and scale and transposition, fix single typos, and
rearrange material.  Not having to cut a \relative call into several
parts for which you have to hand-recalculate the starting pitch might
actually be an advantage.

For the majority of people interested in scores, LilyPond is
gobbledygook.  They still want to pull scores from it.

-- 
David Kastrup