Re: Change to \rest markup in 2.23

[David F.]

> On Jul 20, 2022, at 5:25 AM, Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> wrote:
> 
> Le 20/07/2022 à 05:57, David F. a écrit :
>> In 2.23, the rest markup command changed from taking a string to taking a 
>> duration.
>> 
>> \version "2.22"
>> \markup \rest #"4.."
>> 
>> \version "2.23"
>> \markup \rest { 4.. }
>> 
>> It would be nice if this change were backward compatible, at least for a 
>> version or two.
> 
> 
> LilyPond's general policy is that backwards-incompatible syntax
> changes are OK as long as a convert-ly rule is provided to update
> input files automatically.
> 
> Well, in this case there is no convert-ly rule ... I'll fix that soon.
> 
> 
>> My primary Lilypond environment is v2.22.2-1 on macOS 10.14.  This is the 
>> environment I use for final “production” of scores.  But I’ve been trying to 
>> do as much development as possible in v2.23 on macOS 10.15.
>> 
>> Unfortunately, the change to the rest markup command makes going back and 
>> forth quite cumbersome.  Would be be possible to make this command take 
>> either a string or duration?
> 
> 
> My answer will be a bit different from Harm's: this sounds like
> an XY problem to me. Why do you want to switch back and forth
> between two LilyPond versions for the same score? Just install
> the same version on both machines. There is no problem with having
> several different versions of LilyPond installed in parallel on
> the same machine, and in Frescobaldi, you can even choose to
> select the LilyPond version from the \version statement (the
> setting is in Edit > Preferences > LilyPond Preferences),
> making this very convenient.
> 


Installing multiple versions of Lilypond isn’t a big deal, per se.  I have 2.22 
and 2.23.10 installed on the macOS 10.14 machine.  I don’t think there is a 
standalone install of v2.22 available for macOS 10.15 and greater, so I think 
I’d have to install MacPorts on the macOS 10.15 machine in order to get 
Lilypond 2.22.  But we can call that a simple annoyance.

The issue, for me, is that I’m trying to be conservative in upgrading to newer 
Lilypond versions.  I have around 100 hymns that get turned into just over 4000 
individual slides.  I can’t realistically inspect each slide after a version 
upgrade, so I’ve been sticking to the Lilypond stable releases for “production” 
generation of my slides.

But, as I said above, I try to do as much development as possible on the latest 
“unstable” version so as to catch problems as soon as possible.  When I first 
moved to version 2.23, I found, for example, that there was an issue with 
handling file paths that contained Unicode characters.  Once I brought the 
issue to the list, Jonas Hahnfeld was able to provide a fix with 2.23.10.

If Lilypond’s policy is as you say, then I might have to reconsider my approach 
to upgrades.  But, likely as not, I’ll just carry on trying to stick with 
stable releases.  I started out on version 2.18 and haven’t really had too much 
trouble switching back and forth between stable and unstable releases.

David F.