Re: bounties

[Joseph Wakeling]

On 06/21/2010 01:46 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
> You wish.  It is a problem when Lilypond is the best tool for the job
> and/or the cheapest.

'Cheapest' is IMO nowhere near as relevant as many people think,
especially when it relates to organizations like publishers or
universities that have large budgets anyway.

As for 'best tool for the job', what job are you referring to?  Are you
sure it is the job that everyone else is trying to do?

> Well, by now everybody and his dog writes diatribes how Stallman and the
> Free Software Foundation and free software are on the road to total
> failure and need to make themselves indistinguishable from those systems
> for which they provide alternatives.

Not me.  I'm with Stallman in the struggle for software freedom, and
find myself amazed by how often people misrepresent and misunderstand
what he and the FSF are on about.

Note that I did list ideological/philosophical reasons as one of the
principal ways to get the self-motivation to learn to use Lilypond.  (It
worked for me.)

> It takes a Stallman to keep course even when in the middle of a
> popularity shouting contest.

Yea, but right now we're not talking about a popularity contest.  It
would be very nice if universities and publishers all enthusiastically
took up the use of Lilypond, but what we're talking about now is
something much simpler -- raising money to dedicate to Lilypond
development and project sustainability.

> For each given platform.  Separately.  Sounds like employment for a
> number of platform-localized frogs.

Well, you have 3 platforms you need to address -- Windows, Mac and
'other UNIX' (GNU+LINUX/BSD/OpenSolaris/.....), the commonalities and
tech-savvy of the latter group being enough that you can group them
together.  Plus most of a 'quick start' would be platform-independent.
All you need is an instruction along the lines of, 'Edit text file
[suggest platform-specific editors], open up command line [with
platform-specific instructions], run Lilypond from the command line.

Then 'click here for more info', taking you to the online or locally
installed documentation.

> One way of evading the question is to make a compellingly good user
> interface on Emacs (which then runs everywhere), but that's not exactly
> a small task to do.  And there are people who would balk at
> "compellingly good" in the same sentence with "Emacs".

Despite the power of Emacs it doesn't make sense to me to use it as the
dedicated platform.  Most users of Lilypond, especially beginners, don't
need the possibilities it offers, and it's difficult to 'get' Emacs if
you do not have a need for more than simple text editing.

If I were aiming for an effective cross-platform editing environment for
Lilypond, I would go for Frescobaldi as the leading candidate -- it has
a nice, friendly interface, good functionality, and Qt/KDE based tools
make for good long term candidates for cross-platform applications.

Best wishes,

    -- Joe