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The LilyPond Report #18
Welcome to this eighteenth issue of the LilyPond Report!
This issue will be filled with emotion and coolness, paper bags and zigzag-ending staves, plus the usual Frogs and Bugs. As always, you are warmly invited to post comments at the bottom of the page, or even contribute to the LilyPond Report’s next issues, by contacting Valentin or Graham.
Editorial
(by Valentin Villenave)
Greetings,
yesterday I was interviewed by a student who’s writing a thesis about Free Software. Explaining why one contributes to Free Software is not always easy, particularly in a world where we were led, for the past two-and-a-half centuries, to believe that working has to be boring, unpleasant, and rewarded only with money. (Yes, that was my social-alienation-theory of the week, bear with me. 
)
The LilyPond project is the first (and only) Free Software project I’ve been involved with, so I probably lack comparison material, but nevertheless I have the feeling that our community has a very specific charm: perhaps because we’re all musicians? Although I’ve never met so many people both talented and smart, what strikes me everyday is the dedication and patience of these people — of course, there are many ways of being kind, some of which may take a while to get used to...
Why contribute to LilyPond? Personally speaking, I began contributing as a way of showing my gratitude to these aforementioned people. I continued contributing because this gratitude somehow turned into friendship (with a hint of pride: hey, I’m hanging out with the cool kids now!). And eventually, at some points I stopped contributing, mainly out of guilt for not being able to be as clever, brave and competent as the rest of us.
Of course, I could hardly speak for other contributors. But how come that leaving this project is so hard, even seemingly impossible, to leave the LilyPond project for good?
There’s an untranslatable French expression for these exceptionally fine dishes or wines one can’t stop asking to be served: "it tastes like revenez-y". Surely, we must do something right, don’t we?
Release news
(by Graham Percival)
The current stable release is 2.12.3-2; all normal users should be engraving with this version. We have no plans on making any more 2.12 releases.
The current development release is 2.13.20. This version has 10 Critical issues, with patches pending for 2 of them. The release is slightly closer than it was when the previous Report was published, but not much. In particular, issue 989 (ensure that no information is only in the regtests) has received almost no attention. This is saddening, since it’s the easiest issue for normal users to help with.
Oh well; if users don’t particularly want 2.14 any time soon, then I shouldn’t get worked up about it either.
In short
(by Valentin Villenave)
- Hey, look: Wikipedia has updated its webdesign before us! Is it a success? Well, let’s have a look at the talk page:
Leave it alone
I like it the way it is. don't mess with it.
WKIPEDIA IS NOT SO GOOD AS IT WAS
wikipedia has grown dull -thus people are not attacted to it.i wish you should improve it,
Is that the kind of reactions we have to expect when we finally release our own new design?
- Hey, look: the new (lovely) companion of Doctor Who
is named... Amy Pond. Sounds familiar?
(And, no, don’t ask how comes a French LilyPonder knows about the very latest episodes of an UK-based TV show. Just, don’t.)
- Andrew Hawryluk has established an interesting comparison of LilyPond’s font vs other music fonts. Nice!
- Comparing music fonts
- Petrucci = old Finale default font
Maestro = new Finale default font
Opus = Sibelius default font
Helsinki = Sibelius alternate font
Feta/Emmentaler = LilyPond font
- fred@ is no longer with us. This mysterious contributor, whom very little is known about, had signed every commit from our (dark, ancient) pre-git times; these commits are now properly attributed. Goodbye fred@!
- So let me get this right: it took us three days, and more than twenty mails, to come up with a name for the bug-handling team: the bug squad!
Nobody else had ever, ever thought of it
Conference sightings!
(by Valentin Villenave)
Reinhold appeared at the Linux Audio Conference in Utrecht / Netherlands, presenting two papers:
- R. Kainhofer: A MusicXML Test Suite and a Discussion of Issues in MusicXML
- R. Kainhofer: OrchestralLily: A Package for Professional Music Publishing with LilyPond and LaTeX
As Reinhold told us:
Both are connected with LilyPond, the first one since the test suite was originally written as regtests for the musicxml2ly converter, but has now reached a state where it is useful also for several other projects. Also, the suite is still in lilypond’s git master in the directory input/regression/musicxml2ly.
And the second paper obviously presents my orchestrallily package and shows off some beautiful scores produced with lilypond.
Both papers can be downloaded from my homepage.
Graham Percival will be at the international Libre Software Meeting 2010 in Bordeaux, France, running from 6 to 11 July 2010. John Mandereau, Valentin Villenave, Nicolas Sceaux and Francisco Vila will be attending as well; Graham will be giving a lecture entitled: Sustainability in Free Software — Developers as a non-renewable resource. Here’s the pitch:
The time and energy which developers spend on open-source projects is not an infinite resource. Developer effort can stall due to external demands on their time (such as family, career, or health), but also due to internal factors (such as a loss of motivation or interest). Long-term projects (5+ years old) should try to engage in sustaindable development practices. How can we retain developer interest? How can we prepare for the inevitable loss of developers? How can we train the next generation of developers?
The LilyPond community definitely can relate to that: for the past couple of years, perhaps our main goal has been to make sure that the LilyPond project can go on as the original lead developers have less and less time to invest in it.
Graham has been at the heart of this perpetuation process: in 2008 with the Grand Documentation Project, that aimed to involve as many people as possible to write better and more maintainable documentation; in 2009 with the Frogs, a bug-fixing task-force magically turning normal people into full-blown, hardcore developers (at least that’s what it looked like from the outside ), and in 2010 with the Grand LilyPond Syntax Stabilization Project, that will hopefully bring us a stable, reliable syntax for the next decade or so.
Wow.
Whilst "developers" certainly are a "non-renewable resource", we do need more people like Graham, who are vital to a Free Software project even though they may not write a single line of code code (actually he does, but you get the point).
Paper-Baggers
(by Graham Percival)
When young children are embarrassed, many hide their faces — trying to hide from the outside world. Well, many LilyPond Developers are still children at heart, and wear brown paper bags over their heads when they screw up.
- Brown Baggin It
- by Brymo (not a LilyPond contributor), license CC-by-sa.
22 March 2010, Han-Wen
Neil wrote: > Your first patch from the set you’ve pushed breaks the > positioning of fetaText glyphs, since they now all have logical > extents in the Y axis (rather than ink extents).
Ouch - can someone pass me the brown-paper bag?
27 March 2010, Jan
Subject: hold your horses, new repo #3 ETA 1500 CET
Han-Wen, you’re ready to hand me the brown paper bag?
29 March 2010, Graham
The attached patch, plus the attached brown-paper-bag-for-Graham discussion on IRC, points to a solution.
IRC discussion:
(16:02:12) janneke: import langdefs; for lang in
langdefs.LANGUAGES: ...
(16:02:41) gperciva: File
"../lilypond/scripts/build/create-weblinks-itexi.py", line 11, in
<module>
(16:02:41) gperciva: import langdefs
(16:02:41) gperciva: ImportError: No module named langdefs
(16:02:48) janneke: try:
(16:02:59) gperciva: remember, we DO NOT COMPILE SCRIPTS ON
LILYPOND.ORG
(16:03:11) janneke: PYTHONPATH=python python
scripts/build/create-weblinks-itexi.py
(16:03:28) gperciva: oh hey, that works
(16:03:31) janneke: YES I BLOODY KNOW THAT - LEARN ABOUT LINUX
ALREADY!!!
(16:03:46) janneke: peace, love etc.
(16:03:48) ***janneke is off
Post-scriptum (in a paper bag)
(by Valentin Villenave)
Actually, a few days before this IRC discussion with Jan, Graham himself had gone berserk towards your truly. That was my first instant-message discussion with him ever, and it only took him a mere five minutes to end up giving me the advice to screw something in something (can’t remember the exact wording)... Nice
Of course, this kind of paper-bag moments Graham was referring to above is by no means a developers’ privilege. Simple users can experience it to, maybe even more so. I still have a very vivid memory of one of my most shameful moments in the LilyPond community (there were plenty, of course): in 2006, I was just beginning to get involved in the community, it was the first time in my life that I subscribed to a mailing list (which, incidentally, is how I learned English), and I had this glorious feeling that, hey, this is where the cool kids are, with their clever remarks and witty jokes, let’s become one of the cool kids, let’s find something funny to say and make everybody laugh!
Needless to say, that was an utter disaster. Perhaps the most pathetic part is, this didn’t even cure me from my chronic overenthusiastic hey-let’s-make-everybody-laugh syndrome.
And what about you, dear readers? Have you ever experienced such a awkward gee-what-was-I-thinking-when-I-posted-this moment? If so, please let us know and perhaps we can laugh about it today, and therefore make you feel better!
(OK. Now, where is this brown paper bag?)
The no-we-don’t-hate-Flash-videos of the Report
(by Valentin Villenave)
A few days ago, our statistics expert Francisco Vila has updated his visualization of LilyPond’s source code contributions. Looking at it made me go through bewilderment, happiness and sadness; I wonder if it will give you the same kind of mixed feelings, depending on your own past with LilyPond — and your amount of sensitivity of course
That was our no-we-don’t-hate-Flash-videos part of the week; for those of us who don’t have Flash, here’s a nice trick to use VLC instead.
News from the Frog Pond
(by Graham Percival)
The Frogs are ordinary LilyPond users who have chosen to get involved in their favorite software’s development. Fixing bugs, implementing new features, documenting the source code: there’s a lot to be done, but most importantly: this is a chance for everyone to learn more about LilyPond, about Free Software, about programming… and to have fun. If you’re curious about any of it, then the word is: Join the Frogs!
In the past two months, the Frogs have begun investigating our
eventual switch to guile 2.0 (which could dramatically speed up
LilyPond), trying to make \thumb behave like fingerings instead of articulations, and trying to improve program output messages.
Honorable mention goes to our new patch-tracking worker, who has uncovered a number of patches that I’d completely forgotten about. It’s sad to think of how much work has been lost in the hustle and bustle of lilypond development; I’m very happy to see a dedicated helper tracking patches!
The Snippet of the Report
(by Valentin Villenave)
Graham was speaking of "work that has been lost"; here’s a very cool snippet that I have just saved from the darkness of forgotten, abyssal eons (namely January 2009):
This snippet was written by Mark Polesky (now one of our most talented Frogs) to demonstrate the ability to have irregular end of staves, an irregularity that can even be emphasized with a zigzag line.
That’s one enjoyable addition for my personal "hey, I had no idea Lily could do that" collection"!
Granted, I was the one who was supposed to add it in the first place (January 2009 was the time where I had to officially deliver the score of my opera to the opera house, maybe that explains why I dropped the ball on this one). I’m glad that it all ended well in this case, but if you do remember of another snippet that has gone lost, please do feel free to nag me with it!
Bug Report of the Report
(by Graham Percival)
Our favorite bug exchange came from a suggestion to allow 3 and 5 as durations. But what would 3 mean?
Trevor Skeggs suggested a dotted 4. since 3 is mid-way between 2 and 4. Boris Shingarov thought that since 2 was half a whole note and 4 was a quarter, 3 should be a third (i.e. a triplet minim / half note). However, David Kastrup neatly resolved the discussion:
That view is far too mathematical. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 are symbols for particular note lengths with a visible representation, without numeric interpretation. 3, 5, 6, 7... don’t have visual representations associated with them. One of the strengths of Lilypond is that you should be able to quote reasonably simple input to a musician without Lilypond knowledge, and he’ll be able to figure out what you mean.
3 and its ilk don’t really fit into that category. Too clever.
Three cheers for keeping LilyPond "non-clever"!
That concludes the eighteenth issue of The LilyPond Report. Next installment is expected on July 1st, Canada Day!
Cheers,
Graham Percival & Valentin Villenave
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