I was going to hold off introducing this until the 3-4 major development issues had been sorted out, but the third time I found myself writing "yes, I have a plan for this, but I'm going to wait a bit before discussing it", I decided I was behaving like a smarmy teenager.
There's nothing time-critical in this thread, so if you're currently working on anything important, skip this email and come back to it later. We won't make any real decisions for a week or so. Lilypond Syntax Development (tentative name) One of the biggest complaints people have with lilypond -- other than that silly "there's no gui" -- is the changing syntax. Now, inventing a language or standards is difficult. If you set it in stone too soon, you risk being stuck with decisions which may limit matters. If you keep on updating the syntax, interaction with older data (and other programs!) becomes complex. However, I think we now have a critical mass of interested users, experience with the syntax, and developers. I therefore propose to have a Grand Project devoted to stabilizing the lilypond input format. SUMMARY Start: Sep 2009. Length: 6-9 months. We're not going to rush this. Goal: define an input format which we commit to being machine-updateable for the forseeable future. Any future patches which change the syntax in a non-convert-ly-able format will be rejected. (subject to the limitations, below) Once this is finished, we will release lilypond 3.0. LIMITATIONS and SCOPE - tweaks will not be included. Anything with \override, \set, \overrideProperty, \tweak, \revert, \unset, #(blah blah) ... including even those names themselves... is still fair game for NOT_SMART convert-ly updates. - other than that, everything is on the table. Is it a problem to have the tagline inside \header? What should the default behavior of \include be? When we abolish \times, do we move to \tuplet 3:2 or \tuplet 2/3 or what (for typical triplets in 4/4 time)? - we need to get standards for commands. This will help users remember them, and reduce the options for future names (and potential renamings later on). \commandOn and \commandOff seem to work well (should we *always* have an Off command?), but what about the "command" part? Should it be \nounVerbOn, or \verbNounOn ? Or \verbNotesWithExtraInformationOn ? - we need standards for the location of commands. Ligature brackets, I'm looking at you. (non-postfix notation must die!) - this Grand Project doesn't change whether we have a 2.16 or not. The main problem will be deciding what to do (with a bit of messiness anticipated for \tuplet); we could definitely release a 2.16 before merging _any_ of these changes. - we obviously can't /guarantee/ that we'll /never/ make any non-convert-ly changes in the basic format. But we *can* guarantee that such changes would force lilypond 4.0, and that we would only do so for overwhelmingly good reasons. WORKFLOW - We're going to have lots and lots of emails flying around. They don't really fit into either -devel or -user, so we'll use a mailist on lilynet.net. Maybe the already-created proposals mailist, maybe a syn...@lilynet.net mailist. - I could be convinced to use the lilynet wiki for this project, although we'd need account-locked pages, and it would increase my workload. - after the initial discussion of proposals has died down, I'll bring it to -devel. We're not going to make any (significant) changes without discussing it on -devel, but we're going to have huge threads about English grammar and silly ideas, and I don't want to clutter up -devel. Once whatever chaotic silliness on the syntax list is settled down, I'll bring the ideas to -devel. - as with GDP, I'll moderate the discussion. Not as with mailist moderation, but rather by introducing issues at specific times. We don't want a free-for-all discussion of all parts of the syntax at once; nothing will get resolved. DISCUSSION Don't respond to any of the specifics yet. Yes, we all have our pet irritations (like "what the mao is up with \paper and \layout?!"). There will be plenty of time to discuss them. At the moment, I'm looking for comments about the mandate -- what's the scope, how much interest is there, and does anybody object to such work? CRESCENDO Reinhold and Frederick: as you may have guessed, I'm proposing that your patch waits until 3.0. Anything requiring such manual tweaks will make some people very unhappy, such as mutopia. I think we should make *all* manual changes at once, but reassure people that this will (probably) be the last time (for non-tweaked scores, at least). This also serves as test of developers: we've avoided getting "pinned down" with the input syntax because that would limit development. How do you two feel about your hard work on the \cr stuff being delayed by up to a year? I don't like asking this, but I think there are solid reasons for it. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
