Re: Missing items to make Cairo ready

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Fri, Jan 6, 2023 at 10:19 AM Jonas Hahnfeld <hahnjo@hahnjo.de> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2023-01-04 at 12:52 +0100, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> > Regarding versioning: the 1.x to 2.x transition was motivated by
> > radical syntax changes that necessitated converting and 'manually'
> > verifying the .ly files. Since Cairo vs. Ghostscript doesn't affect
> > the semantics of .ly files, I think we can continue the 2.x version
> > number. As a practical example, page layout was introduced in 2.4, and
> > direct to PostScript only became default in 2.6; both changes are much
> > more invasive than what we are discussing here.
>
> Regardless of what has been done in prior versions, it seems to me the
> cleanest solution still is to remove a number of markup commands that
> we cannot or do not want to support with Cairo. We know some are used
> in existing libraries and scores, so this constitutes a breaking
> change. What exactly is your argument for *not* going to version 3.x in
> that case?

I don't think there is value in removing markup commands. When we drop
the PS backend, folks that use \postscript or \epsfile can do

  lilypond --ps foo.ly && ps2pdf foo.ps

rather than

  lilypond foo.ly

and have their scores mostly work. We don't need to remove support for
this, ever. Since this doesn't break backward compatibility, I don't
think we need a major version bump.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - hanwenn@gmail.com - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen