Re: Paralellizing Lilypond [was: Re: Sibelius Software UK office shutsdown]

[David Kastrup]

"address@hidden" <address@hidden> writes:

> On 11 août 2012, at 15:16, Graham Percival <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 01:21:27PM +0100, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>>> ... but I think it emphasizes my real point: this puts the onus on
>>> the user to split up a project into independently-compilable units.
>>> I think that it's worth having Lilypond try and automatically
>>> identify independent units, which could have knock-on benefits in
>>> terms of minimizing rebuild times for scores.
>> 
>> Even though this phrase has gone out of favor, it was really
>> common 5-10 years ago on the lilypond mailing lists, and I think
>> it's appropriate: Patches appreciated.
>
> On this subject, I'll say that one of my hats on the development team
> is that of FrogMeister, or the person who helps people with first
> projects in LilyPond coding.  I have been tied up w/ professional
> obligations for a while now and don't read the lists as attentively as
> I used to but I'm always glad to lend a helping hand for someone who
> wants to start off.  So if you're interested in doing some coding work
> on LilyPond, lemme know!  All levels of expertise (including none at
> all) are welcome.

It would likely not be the best utilization of enthusiasm to let people
set out on impossible tasks.  LilyPond is too programmatic to be
amenable to computer discovery of independent components in one LilyPond
document.

To make progress in this kind of problem space, one would need to work
with LilyPond itself: either cutting out ways to reasonably split one
work into "modules", or by defining subsets of the input language that
even _could_ be guaranteed to be workable independently.

-- 
David Kastrup