lilypond-user
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?


From: Adam Spiers
Subject: Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 19:28:57 +0000

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 6:13 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 02/28/2013 06:20 PM, Adam Spiers wrote:
>>
>> I strongly disagree, unless your definition of "difficult" ignores
>> the time dimension of such a project.
>>
>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
>
> It can go horribly wrong, yes, but it doesn't have to.  Git for example was
> a from-scratch attempt at DVCS -- if Linus Torvalds had started from e.g.
> Arch or Darcs, it's unlikely that we'd have had the innovative DVCS that we
> see today.

That's an excellent counter-example, thanks!  FWIW, git is very
roughly half the LoC of LilyPond.

>> Know-how and experience do not enable large, functional code-bases to
>> be magically constructed in short time spans.  They help increase
>> velocity and quality, but any new code-base takes a long time to grow.
>
> Yes, but it takes even longer if you begin from the wrong starting point.
> Neither Lilypond nor MuseScore really does what this team seem to be aiming
> for

Well, presumably that's speculation unless you have inside info ;-)
Or did I miss some publically announced details?

>>> but because they are writing a completely new codebase, they do
>>> not have to be constrained by historical mistakes or backwards
>>> compatibility.
>>
>> Nor would they be constrained by these if they started with LilyPond.
>
> Lilypond's existing architecture is a constraint, its existing syntax is
> another constraint.  And much as I admire Lilypond, I doubt its design is
> entirely free of mistakes ... ;-)

Sure; my point was that existing architectures can be changed without
a rewrite.

>> Finally we can agree on something ;-)  But Daniel Spreadbury already
>> admitted that they haven't even looked at the LilyPond and MuseScore
>> code, therefore they have dismissed the possibility even before doing
>> a technical feasibility study.
>
> Well, of course not.  They won't want to risk the possibility of GPL'd code
> influencing what they write.  The simplest legal defence against accusations
> of copying is, "I've never looked at that code."

Right, he already said that in his response to me.

> But the bottom line is, their licensing choices and their reasons for
> building a project from scratch are fairly orthogonal.

Maybe; we can only guess what their reasons are.

> Personally, I doubt that Lilypond's design choices fit well with a piece of
> software that's designed to provide real-time WYSIWYG engraving,

Of course there's not a natural fit yet - the most obvious clash being
the number of engravings per process invocation.  But things like that
are surmountable through refactoring, and I believe people such as Jan
and the Scorio guys have already worked on solutions to this.

> MuseScore's data structures are likely to be far too limited compared to
> what the former Sibelius team are setting out to do.

Probably, but again, data structures can be changed ...

> It's a shame that the opportunity to do so was taken away from them by a
> firm corporate decision to build a proprietary project,

We don't know that's what happened, do we?

> but I suspect that even with firm backing for a free software
> package, they'd have chosen to start from the ground up.

Sadly I think you're probably right.  I think I'll retire from this
thread now, since there's no use crying over spilt milk for longer
than necessary ;-)



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]