Re: Request for feedback on 'lobbying' paper

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi,

2013/4/22 Urs Liska <address@hidden>:
> I'm in a hurry to prepare the material for the oral presentation.

Good luck!  If a recording will be available, i'd gladly watch it.

> I will leave out as much of the technical details as possible and focus
> on an endorsement of what can be done (and not how it is to be done).
> And I'll probably start with LilyPond right away. For the main part of
> the target group this will be the most natural link to get into
> discussion. From using versioning it's then a more natural way to extend
> to also using LaTeX.

+1
I think that starting with Markdown may be a good idea, because it's
very simple.  Then LilyPond.
BTW, i'm sure that all the details could be turned into a more
in-depth, "let's get our feet wet" papers.

> [...] MusicXML [...]

indeed.
;)

some more thoughts:

It may be a good idea to explain why plain-text approach isn't
widespread yet, because people will probably think "there must be a
trick here; if it was really so brilliant everyone would use it
already".

While i'm very enthusiastic about git, it may be a better idea to
advertise using mercurial here.  I've read a bit about mercurial, and
it seems to be quite similar to git indeed (one thing that i missed is
git's powerful rebase, but people new to vcs would probably have huge
problems with such advanced tools).  One big advantage is that
mercurial is natively cross-platform, while git was created with Linux
in mind.  As a small addition, i've found a nice simple gui called
easymercurial, which seems to be really great for beginners.  I
haven't found anything similar for git.  Anyway, it should be possible
to write this part of the article in a way that fits both mercurial
and git.

As for plain text advantages, i've found some more:
- your content is safer: even if the program/computer crashes, your
data won't become corrupted.
- greater availability: you can write your content in a smartphone (i
don't imagine Finale on a touchscreen), on your friends' computer, in
an internet cafe - and compile it at home
- smaller filesize and easy compressability make it perfect for big databases
- plain text is possible to recover from a hard disk crash or partial
file corruption.  In case of binary files recovery is quite impossible
(i've experienced this myself).

Man, am i excited!

best,
Janek