Unless there's a totally unexpected deluge of help for the website
from my recent plea on the -user list, I can't imagine it being
ready for 2.14. And I can't recommend delaying 2.14 just for a
new website.
That said, I still think that the new website would better meet
the needs of most users, so I propose to add a link to the draft
in 2-3 week. (hosted on lilypond.org/~graham/ )
We'll explain that it's although it's a draft, it might be easier
for good English readers to find the info they want, but that it
is still a work in progress and hasn't been translated yet, etc.
I'd still like to have some changes in the documentation, but I'm
scaling them back, and I will *NOT* attempt to touch the build
system again. I'm going to wait for somebody else to do it. This
is not a particularly happy state of affairs, but it's too
inefficient for me (and others to clean up) to work with the
makefiles / stepmake system.
I tried adding an SCons build system for the website, but I'm not
at all impressed by the result after an hour. But if we *do*
switch to SCons or waf or cmake (hopefully not) or whatever, I'll
learn that new system.
As an aside, I *really* wish that we had spent the extra effort to
make the makefiles, python scripts, etc written in a readible
fashion. IMO, "ease of understanding" is the most important part
of a build system or build-related script. Most people helping
with lilypond these days *don't* know a lot about makefiles,
python, and perl, so stuff like
v = '.'.join (['%d' % vc for vc in v])
almost guarantees that I'm going to bug the original author(s) for
any modifications.
YES, I'm quite capable of wading through the python docs and/or
adding reams of print commands to that script to understand it
(web/scripts/format-page.py, for the curious), but that's very
inefficient. Better for me to spend an hour processing a few bugs
and touching up the docs, rather than five hours decyphering
uncommented confusing code.
lilypond-texi2html.init is a *great* example of a "build" script
done well. It has sensible variable names, is well-commented, and
the most advanced perl it uses is "shift", "$_", and "."
(concatenation). I admit that I have a huge bias against @$perl
and $$it's &$ridiculous $variable{$rules}, @but that's just part
or the language and can't be avoided.
(for those not familiar with perl, I didn't invent any of those
punctuation marks; they all mean specific things, and are used in
that file)
Bravo to Reinhold, John, and anybody else who worked on this stuff
last year!
Cheers,
- Graham
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