Hi Jeremiah,
I neglected to consider the development releases. I feel so incompetent.
No need to!
The term "development" (as opposed to "stable") tends to scare users
away. And while it is basically true that
- the development releases might have syntax changes (that might even be
changed again in later development releases)
- the development releases reflect the current state of cutting-edge
development and therefore may contain changes that turn later out to be
less than ideal and have to be reverted,
in practice, the development releases are absolutely suited for everyday
production work. The reason is that there's a pretty rigid procedure for
adding new changes (commits, merge requests) to LilyPond which includes
both a thorough review and automated tests against a very extensive
suite of regression tests.
So, I've always thought that the juxtaposition of "stable" vs.
"unstable" releases on the LilyPond home page is not really ideal, as
nobody wants to have "unstable" software. But these releases are
routinelly stable for use; they're just not guaranteed to be stable in
the sense of having frozen feature sets.
But: With the newly created binaries for current MacOS, we're actually
really at the point where we talk about "new infrastructure, please test
and report back if you encounter problems". If you're willing to do that
- and the lilypond-user list is a great place for reporting back -, you
should be good to go with the new 2.23.6 release. Happy engraving!
I understand what a binary is, but I am lost when I read "GUB" and
"Guile,"
Perfectly understandable. You don't need to worry about "GUB", that is
an internal tool used to create the (old-style) releases for all platforms.
"Guile" is more likely to come up more often: As you probably know as a
10-year user of LilyPond, we have an integrated interpreter for the
Scheme programming language that allows us to do all sorts of fancy
things in LilyPond ("color your notes by pitch" etc.). We're in Scheme
mode as soon as we have to write "#(" in LilyPond - and, by the way, in
everyday work we know need fewer "#" signs than before. The version of
Scheme that's integrated into LilyPond is called "Guile". (And the
switch from Guile 1.8 to Guile 2.x was a huge amount of work by the
developers involved since Guile 2 sports extensive internal changes.)
Lukas
