markup signature generalization (was: bounties)

[David Kastrup]

Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi David,
>
>> Who gets the bounty?  Developer or committer?
>
> Developer. From the person who wants the fix.
> For example, I paid Han-Wen to program the lyricMelismaAlignment property.
>
>> Maybe I should start setting bounties for patches of my own
>> in order to get them committed.
>
> Sure: then you (the requester) can pay you (the developer) whatever
> you think the feature is worth.  =)

Sounds like a good deal.  I think I'll pay myself the equivalent of $50
when my patch gets accepted.  After all, putting markup signature on the
same per-element signature definition system paves the ground for
letting music and markup functions accept a larger set of arguments,
like pitches, or chord-mode items and so on.  That makes it possible to
implement things like \transpose (which accepts pitch, pitch, music) as
pure user-level functions.

With a bit more of unification, other user-defined function classes
(rather than just the present music, markup, markup list) might be
reasonably straightforward to implement.

The patch reduces the (uncommented) line count.  Most importantly, the
line count in the user documentation.  Not because the documentation
gets worse, but because there is less for the user to bother about.

I think that the $50 I'll pay myself when this gets through is
well-invested.  Reducing line counts while extending functionality is a
good deal.

-- 
David Kastrup