Re: Issue 884 in lilypond: pageBreak resets page-count property

[lilypond]

Comment #6 on issue 884 by perpeduumimmobile: pageBreak resets page-count  
property
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=884

Thanks, Joe, works like a charm.
Is it reasonable to make page-count to automatically repeat the last item  
of the list as necessary to get the n+1 elements?  I.e., specifying #'(3 1  
2) and 5 \pageBreaks will automatically expand to #'(3 1 2 2 2)?

While I very much appreciate the possibility to give such a list, it'd  
still be nice to be able to use both a total (single-integer) page-count  
and forced breaks.
On the other hand, I suspect it's hard (especially w.r.t. computation time)  
to automatically deduce the best integers in the list, summing up to a  
given page-count.  I assume a penalty calculation is there, since that's  
already needed for the chunk breaking; but simply trying all possibilies of  
chunk sizes for total page-count of t and a number of forced breaks of m  
amounts to (t-1) choose m runs of the page-breaking algorithm...  D'you  
think there's still a chance for it, e.g. using a heuristic of starting  
with an uniform distribution of the pages to the chunks, or counting  
measures / graphical elements as an estimate?

[ @Kieren: This seems to be the same idea you just proposed.  I'm afraid it  
looks computationally hardly feasible to my eyes... ]

Another idea: how hard is it to allow nil values in the list, corresponding  
to chunks for which LilyPond is free to choose the optimal number of  
pages?  (nil is also a good candidate for missing entries in the list, by  
the way.)