Re:improving LilyPond useability

[Kevin Patrick Barry]

I just thought I'd add my thoughts to the pile (I'm responding to more
than one thread of ideas; apologies for that).

Re text editors/lilypond environments and people's first experience
with LilyPond: when I first tried LilyPond (on the advice of a friend
who had never used it) I tried it using LilyPad and the learning
manual. Although I eventually succeeded in creating a small score of
about two lines I found the process so painful (I had never worked
with plain text or any kind of code before) that I abandoned LilyPond,
and only came back to it some time later, when I became more
interested in open source software.

Either LilyPad needs to be improved, or people need to be *strongly*
encouraged to download Frescobaldi.  For LilyPad to be a good enough
(in my opinion) first editor for LilyPond files it should have syntax
highlighting. (LilyPond comes bundled with files that do this for
Emacs, so I assume it's possible? I'm not a computer programmer.)  It
should have a compilation option in a menu so that the drag and drop
process is not necessary, and it should work on each of the main
operating system types.  Assuming this is a lot of work I would say
just make people download Frescobaldi - without this program I would
definitetly not be a LilyPond user.

Re packages and modular development: I obviously don't fully
appreciate the coding implications of what has been discussed, but as
a LaTeX user the idea of making LilyPond a more stable base on which
extensions can be added seems like a brilliant idea.

I have to say that it is mildly irritating that so much of the list
have been using 2.17.xx and its changed syntax and so on, while I am
stuck on 2.16 waiting for the next stable version (I have one
mission-critical project that I can't take any risks with).

Kevin