Re: LilyPond web service

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 02:30:54PM +0200, Harmath Dénes wrote:
> OK, this poses the following questions:

These questions have been raised before; please search the mailist
for previous discussions if you're serious about it.

> - What reasonable limitation can be established on the input, in aspect 
> of either quantity or quality? Regarding quality, is safe mode enough?

Some people would say yes, others would say no.  As far as
security goes, safe mode is *not* enough.

If people were interested, they could work on safe mode... both in
terms of making it more secure, and also more engraving
feature-complete... but we have not had sufficient interest.

> - Is there an option to let LilyPond only render the first page of the  
> output, since this web service would only serve the first page as PNG?

Not without changing the input, which you might want to do anyway.
There's the -dpreview option, which only does the first system.

Of course, somebody could change the line width to get an immesely
long and complicated "first system", so this isn't sufficient from
a security standpoint.

> - Would putting requests in a queue help? Are there benchmarks on the  
> number of acceptable simultaneous requests?

Requests in a queue would help your computer not get overwhelmed,
but one person could still do a denial-of-service.

Cheers,
- Graham