Re: openlilylib pull request

[David Kastrup]

Simon Albrecht <simon.albrecht@mail.de> writes:

> On 08/05/2022 20:37, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
>> The case study of how OLL fell out of maintenance is one of the
>> things leading me to think that a model where snippets providing
>> significant functionality and becoming somewhat popular get
>> upstreamed into the LilyPond core is a better fit for LilyPond
>> than them letting them be provided through external packages. 
>
>
> In many cases, that may be true. In other cases, it really makes sense
> to allow for a more flexible space of user code available to the
> community.
>
> The TeX ecosystem may have some issues with maintaining packages and
> especially with interoperability, but it provides an unbelievable
> wealth of high-quality additions to the core software that could never
> be provided otherwise. Due to the relative lack of adoption and the
> small size of the community LilyPond can’t seem to take some threshold
> toward creating a similarly stable ecosystem (so far?).

The "TeX ecosystem" consists of plain TeX with fudge-ons (comparable to
LilyPond and LSR snippets), of the monolithic Context (driven by a
not-much-more-than-one-man company), and of the modular LaTeX.  The only
system that has exploded in number and functionality of extensions and
styles is LaTeX.

That suggests that the development potential is not as much dependent on
the underlying technology but of readily available interfaces for
integrating both functionality as well as document styles into a fixed
framework.

-- 
David Kastrup