Re: convert-ly problem

[Erik Sandberg]

On Monday 25 July 2005 17.47, Laura Conrad wrote:
> >>>>> "ES" == Erik Sandberg <address@hidden> writes:
>     ES> \addlyrics (2.0) is converted to \oldaddlyrics, which is
>     ES> strongly deprecated, and pretty unsupported. It is known that
>     ES> it sometimes doesn't work.
>
> This seems like a bad decision to me, for a number of reasons:
>
>      One of the ways old users learn to use new features is to run
>      convert-ly on their old source.  If convert-ly creates bad
>      lilypond, it makes learning to use the new features difficult.
>
>      It means that nobody will upgrade lilypond who is working on a
>      large vocal music project.  Therefore, the newer versions of
>      lilypond will get less testing on such projects.

Yes, this is a known problem which we have discussed earlier. There is a 
trade-off between spending lots of time on maintaining old deprecated code, 
and forcing old users to do manual work.

>     ES> There is no good automated way to convert from \oldaddlyrics
>     ES> to \lyricsto, so I'm afraid you'll have to fix it manually.
>
> I'm willing to believe there is no automated way to convert every
> possible \addlyrics to an equivalent \lyricsto.  I don't believe that
> the most common cases couldn't be handled.  For example, two verses,
> with a chorus appended to the first verse, as in the example I
> submitted.

The main problems are:
 - Two verses now require two separate Lyrics contexts.
 - Convert-ly is regexp-driven. If you can figure out a nice way to express a 
partial \addlyrics -> \lyricsto conversion rule with regular expressions, 
this would be very welcome. 

Otherwise, there is always a chance that Han-Wen could implement a more 
advanced (possibly non-regexp) conversion hack in exchange for donations; you 
could ask him for that if you like.

Erik