Re: How to organize a single piece of work with different versions?

[Urs Liska]

Hi Edmundo,


Am 11.02.2018 um 08:11 schrieb Edmundo Carmona Antoranz:
> Hi!
>
> As you might have noticed from previous mails I have sent, I'm working
> on a project to process works from Bach on lilypond.
>
> I have already put up BWV 1013 and 1030 (I dare you to guess the
> instrument that I play). However, each one of them has many different
> editions. Right now I have set up 2 editions of BWV 1030 (on top of
> Bach's manuscript). Bach's manuscript is on 'master' and I have set up
> 1 branch for each of the other 2 editions (this also allows to be able
> to see differences between the editions _relatively_ easily). I have
> also set up different book name prefixes so that files (PDF and midi)
> come out with different names as well (which requires switching
> between branches in order to be able to generate the different
> editions).
>
> I would like to get your feedback to know if this is the right
> approach or if I should try something different.

You *can* use branches that way, but I don't think this is ideal (please 
others correct me if I'm wrong and there are successful experiences with 
that approach). If you do that you have to be *extremely* careful (over 
the whole time you work on the editions) not to mess things up. This is 
especially true since you seem to plan to have many works in one repository.

I can't go into detail here but my basic concern is that you will always 
have to keep all branches up-to-date. Whenever you make any 
modifications to the master branch you should merge that into all other 
branches in order to ensure that they don't deviate too much or that you 
run into the situation that at one point something breaks and a score 
won't compile anymore.

In addition switching branches to switch editions doesn't seem like a 
very practical idea on the long run (it's no accident that you 
highlighted the word "relatively" both in your email and the README).

###

Essentially I'd advise you to encode the differences between the 
different sources directly in the score.

My first question is: do you just look for a solution that "works" or 
are you ready to *work* towards such a solution?
Second: to you need a solution *now* or does it have some time?

Why am I asking these questions?
I'm currently busy with a project where this issue will soon come up, 
and I want to develop a solution to encode variants in LilyPond. I 
intend to build a solution that follows the the ideas of "critical 
apparatus" and "regularization" in MEI (http://music-encoding.org). The 
documentation for these should be at 
http://music-encoding.org/documentation/3.0.0/critApp/ and 
http://music-encoding.org/documentation/3.0.0/editTrans/#edittransReg 
but the whole MEI Guidelines seem down currently.
The critical apparatus is intended for encoding variant readings that 
stem from different sources, which is exactly what you are dealing with, 
while the regularization module is intended for encoding things like 
editorial additions, regularizations or even "sic" entries (i.e. "I know 
this is wrong but that's what's in the source").
My plan is to have functions to cleanly encode such variants in LilyPond 
and have a way to configure on document level which readings should be 
used for engraving.
*Probably* I will integrate this functionality with the scholarLY 
package from openLilyLib and its annotations, which would make it 
possible to enter annotations on the variants in the same place.

If that sounds interesting to you I'm happy about more people to discuss 
(and test) such features.

(For completeness: if you are looking for a solution that works with 
current LilyPond tools it should be doable with \tag-s - the tool 
originally made for that use case 
(http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/different-editions-from-one-source.en.html)

Best
Urs

> In case you want to take a look: https://github.com/eantoranz/bwv
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
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