Re: lilypond source and music sheet database

[Yann]

> Hi,
>
> 2013/4/6 Stjepan Horvat <address@hidden>:
>> Hey guys .. what would you prefer using as a lilypond database. I have bunch
>> of files in bunch of folders laying around my pc with diferent versions of
>> the same song, 20 same/diffrent config files, unsorted and some of them
>> already are lost or can't find. Call it as a local "publishing" thing. I was
>> using git but they say it is not good for binary (pdf) files..it is for
>> programming..i want something where i can look for something i made 2 years
>> ago. What are your solutions..?!
>
> I am using git and i'm *very* happy about it.  Git can be used for
> everything, binary files too.  Of course, the problem with pdfs is
> that they cannot be easily diffed, but that's not particular to git -
> i don't think other VCS do better in this regard.
>
> The things is, use git for tracking source files, not pdfs.  If you
> put \version statements in all your .ly files, you can always recreate
> a pdf with appropriate LilyPond version.
>
> Actually, it might make sense to track some pdfs as well, but i'd say
> only the versions that are somewhat final, and i'd create two
> repositories: one with sources, in which all pdfs would be ignored,
> and another one with finished ("published") versions of pdfs - ones
> that are supposed to change rarely.
>
> hope this helps you,
> janek
>
> PS depending on your experience with VCSes (and your OS) Mercurial
> might be a better choice sometimes.

Hi,

I don't know if this will be useful, but this is just a small comment
(somewhat off topic) on my (small) experience with this kind of
things.
For a project I currently work on (a set of songs and hymns that we
are still heavily modifying and arranging), I did set up a mercurial
repository, to keep track of all the changes in the ly files.

I decided not to track the pdf and midi files, but I did some
makefiles and shell scripts to ease the compiling of the whole project
(this part is easier on linux-like systems I guess).
With this system set up on a server, I can have the relevant pdf and
midi files compiled and published to a www folder whenever a
contributor pushes some changes on the repository (thanks to some
mercurial hooks, that can run a script on a given event).

I chose mercurial mainly because it works well on win systems, with a
gui, so it can be easier to use in our team, for non-technical users
that are unlikely to use linux. Second reason was the possibility to
set up hooks to manage the automatic compilation thing.
(then I discovered several fancies extensions that were adding useful features).


Anyways, even if this is probably too complicated for most uses,
managing source versions of scores with a version control system is
really helpful even for day to day use (though it implies a bit of
learning at the beginning). I would say makefiles are really useful as
well when working on multi instrumental scores (managing instruments
parts ans so on).


Good night !
If the system described is interesting someone, I can give more details on it.

Yann