RE: Coexisting 2.8 with 2.4

[Fairchild]

Graham -

Some convert-ly experience, on the file just submitted to LSR as "File
Information".  2.4.6 to 2.8.5.

Finding a way to execute convert-ly took several hours of stumbling around.
Haven't succeeded from jEdit.  Expected to find an .exe file.  A way that
works is to invoke with a DOS shell from the directory that contains
convert-ly.py and python.exe (and/or python2.4.exe?).  Documented?

Some details:
- Correctly changed "\column <" to \column {" 
- Incorrectly changed a ">" to "}" in scheme code
- Got a second set correctly
- The command-line has changed from
       ("lilypond" "/cygdrive/C/ . . . /file.ly")
        to
       ("C:\\lilypond\\usr\\bin\\lilypond-windows.exe" "file.ly")
       so must be analyzed differently to extract the file name.
       Difficult to convert, but ought to be flagged or documented.
- The string 'strftime "%T"' must be changed to 'strftime "%H:%M:%S"'.  The
shortcut doesn't work in 2.8.5.  LilyBug?
- \line isn't inserted where required.  Documented.  A biggie.
- Fonts, vertical spacing and horizontal spacing are quite different.  A
show stopper.  See attached files.

                          - Bruce (Also wondering "The reason why")

-----Original Message-----
From: Graham Percival [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2006 12:55 PM
To: Fairchild
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Coexisting 2.8 with 2.4


Fairchild wrote:
> Many have invested extensive effort in creating quality scores with 
> various versions.

The "guidelines for writing lilypond files" section of the manual attempts
to mitigate this.  By writing lilypond files carefully, you can reduce the
problems associated with upgrading versions.

>  To encourage upgrading there should be some automated mechanism for 
> upward compatibility, or earlier versions should be supported.
> 
> The string replacement capabilities in convert-ly are useful, but far 
> from adequate.

Additional support for older versions requires more effort.  There are three
reasons that people work on lilypond:
1)  Getting paid for a specific features.  (see the "sponsoring" links)
2)  Solving a personal problem (ie if I were a programmer and were annoyed
by a bug, I could fix the bug and send my patch in).
3)  Contributing due to a vague sense of owing something to the community.
(such as basically all my doc work)

You might argue that all the developers have an obligation to maintain the
input syntax (under #3), but Han-Wen has always been clear that the input
format may change from time to time.  In addition, Erik has been working on
a system which avoids the problem of the changing input syntax.  This should
be available in lilypond 2.10.


Having just updated from 2.4, perhaps you could help to fill in this 
documentation.  According to these docs, the only change that convert-ly 
  cannot handle between 2.4 and 2.8 is the \markup issue and utf-8 
characters.  I'm sure that there are more problems than that, but I 
don't know what they are.

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.9/Documentation/user/lilypond/Updating-files-with
-convert_002dly.html

>> The TEX and DVI back-ends are more or less unsupported. Why would you 
>> want the DVI.
> 
> ** Point-and-click and convenient preview from jEdit.

Point-and-click now works for ps, and I believe even pdf.  I don't know 
how this fits in with jEdit.

Cheers,
- Graham

FileInfo28.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

FileInfo24.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document