Re: producing "archival" scores

[Graham Percival]

David Rogers wrote:
> Once you ask "But which software might be slightly better to have in
> the future?", nobody can give a good answer, because too many
> assumptions are required. All of the software choices carry huge
> risks, when you compare them to keeping a physical human-readable
> archive.

I agree that physical human-readable archives are the best choice, but 
we _can_ make reasonable assumptions about software-based solutions. 
Open-source software will never have any legal barriers to use (as 
opposed to a copy of Sibelius should that company go bankrupt).  Popular 
projects/formats are more likely to receive the necessary tweaking to 
ensure that they are still usable.

As much as I hate to admit it, by this point it seems that musicXML is a 
better long-term (10+ years) storage format than lilypond.  You might 
need to write a special program that translates the 2006 musicXML into 
the popular freely-documented music format of 2020, but such programs 
will probably exist already or will be relatively easy to write.

Cheers,
- Graham