radio silence on emacs patch?

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Hi Eli,

Han-Wen and I are the lead developers of GNU LilyPond, the GNU project
music typesetter, that can be used to produce beautiful sheet music.
It works from a description file, not unlike (La)TeX for texts.

Correcting mistakes in a piece of music can be tedious, you're
comparing three things: the sheet music on your lap, the output on
your (Xdvi) screen, and the LilyPond input.

A year ago, Han-Wen wrote a clever hack to allow point and click
editing with LilyPond, through Xdvi and GNU Emacs: you click on a note
in your Xdvi window, and Emacs positions the cursor on the description
of that note in the source file.  Needless to say that this is a real
big help in correcting LilyPond scores.  See:

   http://lilypond.org/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Point-and-click.html

The thing is that Xdvi and Emacs needed to be patched; Xdvi must emit
file,line and column source specials, and Emacs (esp. emacsclient)
needs to dig `+LINE:COLUMN FILE' placement.

The patch has been sent to bug-gnu-music twice, and has been
distributed with GNU LilyPond for a year now.  Now that's all great,
but patching and recompiling these programs is well beyond the
capabilities of many LilyPond's users; they're musicians who are happy
if they can get GNU/Linux even installed.

Han-Wen's patch (and some unrelated bugfixes of mine) were rapidly
integrated in Xdvi.  But until now, we seem to have failed to get the
patch included in Emacs (http://people.debian.org/~kitame/emacs21).
Or to get any other useful response or discussion.

To try and help the process, and by virtue of Kitame's emacs-21.0.104
snapshot, I've updated, completed and polished the patch a bit:

    http://appel.lilypond.org/software/emacs-21.0.104.jcn1.diff

Could you please help me or advise me on how to get this patch into
Emacs?  LilyPond users would really benefit from this, if it were
included in a next Emacs release.

Sorry to mail you directly about this, but we've had contact before
about texinfo, so I may not be in your killfile; and bug-gnu-emacs is
clearly not working.  I can't begin to tell you how sad I feel about
this.  If even we (@gnu.org) are being ignored by Emacs developers,
how many others have been shied away?

Greetings,
Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org