Re: The LilyPond Report: a new weekly opinion column about Lily's world

[Karl Hammar]

Villenave:
> http://valentin.villenave.info/spip.php?article62
...
> discuss the use of old LilyPond versions.
...

>From the above link:
L> Recently, several mails on our mailing list made me realize that people
L> are actually using these old versions of LilyPond [2]:
... <names removed saving myself the disgrace>
L> This is something I simply cannot understand. As a genuine geek, I have
L> always been installing latest, bleeding-edge material, and I just feel
L> dishonoured when the Linux kernel I\u2019m running is three weeks
L> old. I\u2019ve been hitting my head against a wall for two years because
L> my girlfriend has kept using MacOS 10.3 while 10.4 and 10.5 were already
L> out, and for a (short) moment I even considered giving Windows Vista a
L> test! 

Well, that is the difference between production (you don't want ANY
surprises, you want the tested and found true) and developing.

There is also a maintainace part. You don't have time to uppgrade all
your files when a new version comes out. It is better to do like, ok I
found 2.6 better than 2.4 even if it changes behaviour (TeX is out).
Is 2.8 worth the price to upgrade all your files, nah, not yet, is 2.10
worth it, hmm, closing, ...

When upgrading, you have to be fluent in both the old and the new, to be
able to resolve problems. Else you will have a lot of oldie ly files
laying around bitrotting.

There is a lot of old ly-files around the net bitrotting as you have
seen. It can be a lot of work to get one of them to work again, and it
made worse by the fact that you don't really know how the result should
look like.

===

You can also compare with Knuth's TeX, same old input file, still able
to use it (though latex has changed a little); emacs, can still use the
same keystrokes I learned 30 years ago; no maintainance hassle -- that
is user friendliness!

Re the kernel thing, isn't it nice to have an uptime in years, possible
months instead of 'well win-98 crashes after 47 days -- nobody has cared
to test its uptime'.

Regards,
/Karl