Re: lybook-db etc etc.

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 05:13:56PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>> 
>> In my opinion, the whole lybook-db stuff needs to go.  Instead, Lilypond
>> is run _once_ for all snippets of a lybook source, generating _one_
>> PostScript file.
>
> ... so instead of only generating snippets it needs, you want to
> generate a full set of snippets for each language, thereby making
> "make doc" take roughly 5 times as long as it currently does?

Wrong.  Thereby making "make doc" do about 5 times the real work as it
currently does, taking a fraction of the time.

That's not just theory.  preview-latex, an old project of mine, does it
that way.  The speed difference to generating and processing individual
eps files is much much higher than 5.

> AFAIK, lybook-db solves that problem.

It's a dead end that admittedly lies downhill from the starting problem.

>>  Then GhostScript is run _once_ to generate a bunch of eps files, or
>> a multi-page PDF file with all graphics in them which get referenced
>> as needed.
>
> This might be a good step.  Although I'm not certain if it'll work
> for the html output -- we *want* separate pngs for each snippet.

GhostScript is perfectly fine with creating hundreds of pngs per run.

>> The resulting speed will be such that saving time via the lybook-db
>> is not a concern.  This would make the pre-push sanity tests so much
>> easier that it would not be funny.
>> 
>> And would definitely simplify the build system.
>
> I am against this right now.  We are in a complete mess, and we do not
> need to add to that mess.

Good argument against cleaning up.

-- 
David Kastrup