Re: convert-ly problem

[Laura Conrad]

>>>>> "ES" == Erik Sandberg <address@hidden> writes:

    ES> On Monday 25 July 2005 17.47, Laura Conrad wrote:
    >> >>>>> "ES" == Erik Sandberg <address@hidden> writes:
    ES> \addlyrics (2.0) is converted to \oldaddlyrics, which is
    ES> strongly deprecated, and pretty unsupported. It is known that
    ES> it sometimes doesn't work.
    >> 
    >> This seems like a bad decision to me, for a number of reasons:
    >> 
    >> One of the ways old users learn to use new features is to run
    >> convert-ly on their old source.  If convert-ly creates bad
    >> lilypond, it makes learning to use the new features difficult.
    >> 
    >> It means that nobody will upgrade lilypond who is working on a
    >> large vocal music project.  Therefore, the newer versions of
    >> lilypond will get less testing on such projects.

    ES> Yes, this is a known problem which we have discussed earlier.

Which "we" is that?  I really think I'd remember a discussion of
convert-ly not converting lyrics any more if it had happened on either
lilypond-user or lilypond-devel.

    ES> There is a trade-off between spending lots of time on
    ES> maintaining old deprecated code, and forcing old users to do
    ES> manual work.

Another branch of the tradeoff might be to not deprecate so much old
code.  

    ES> There is no good automated way to convert from \oldaddlyrics
    ES> to \lyricsto, so I'm afraid you'll have to fix it manually.
    >> 
    >> I'm willing to believe there is no automated way to convert every
    >> possible \addlyrics to an equivalent \lyricsto.  I don't believe that
    >> the most common cases couldn't be handled.  For example, two verses,
    >> with a chorus appended to the first verse, as in the example I
    >> submitted.

    ES> The main problems are:

    ES>  - Two verses now require two separate Lyrics contexts.  -
    ES>  Convert-ly is regexp-driven. If you can figure out a nice way
    ES>  to express a ES> partial \addlyrics -> \lyricsto conversion
    ES>  rule with regular expressions, ES> this would be very
    ES>  welcome.

I was building lilyond at the end of the 2.5-2.6 development cycle,
and was able to contribute code in a small way.  Since then, the
dependencies have changed so that my system no longer builds lilypond
in either the 2.6 branch or the 2.7 branch.  Since Serpent
Publications (me) has decided that the costs outweigh the benefits of
converting to 2.6 (see
<http://www.laymusic.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2005/07/21#050721-lilypond>
for the rationale behind this decision), I really can't justify
spending time figuring out (again) how to get a build environment for
a program I'm not going to really be using.

Does anyone know how much lilypond out there is orphaned?  Between the
fact that old versions of lilypond don't run on modern machines and the
fact that there's a lot of lilypond that convert-ly doesn't handle,
there must be a lot of stuff that nobody can compile  without major
manual labor.  At what point is this volume of stuff going to feed
into design decisions?  Surely the lilypond developers want people to
be able to transcribe something and still be able to use it a year or
even 10 years from now?

-- 
Laura (mailto:address@hidden , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097  fax: (501) 641-5011
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139