Although I have long experience in software development, the Lilypond
source is a body of work that I have never really been able to
comprehend. This is a pity as I always wanted to help with development.
Now, when I have technical issues need knowledge of internals, such as
my recent effort relating to noteheads, there is a handful of deeply
learned people who come to my assistance, and I am grateful. What I want
to ask today is this. The solutions seem to pull commands out of thin
air with deep understanding, and I have no idea how to find out this
stuff for my self. The internals reference manual is hardly discursive
in nature. So Jean, Valentin, Harm (still here?), how have you come to
acquire this deep knowledge? I don't know how or where to start.
So much of my modernist work needs internals knowledge, and even though
I have built up a large library of extension code in Lilypond and
Scheme, I am still all at sea.
Any advice? I know Scheme and C++ very well. It's the functions and what
they do that I don't understand enough. Here's an example.
LY_DEFINE (ly_stencil_outline, "ly:stencil-outline",
2, 0, 0, (SCM stil, SCM outline),
R"(
Return a stencil with the stencil expression (inking) of stencil
@var{stil} but
with outline and dimensions from stencil @var{outline}.
I can understand what dimensions means but what is the 'outline' of a
stencil, and how is it used? Just one example of my profound ignorance.
Andrew
