Re: Moving to 2.8.4--a nightmare?

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 16:58:46 +0200
Sebastiano Vigna <address@hidden> wrote:

> It's being very, very difficult. I have insisted in the past and will
> insist again on this--if Lilypond continues to be such a moving
> target, it will never be a format of choice for storing music. 

Erik's "music streams" work should theoretically eliminate these
problems -- but not for the Snippet Repository, since we want the
snippets to remain in the normal input form.

> A quick tour of the problems, hoping someone can help. BTW, is there
> an official guide about the conversion (don't tell me to do
> convert-ly -s, please :).

There's "updating with convert-ly" (doc section 13.3 in the 2.9 docs;
probably something like 12.3 in the 2.8 docs), but they haven't been
updated in a year or so.

I can explain a few of these, but please don't interpret these
explanations as excuses.  I agree that the "moving target" is a serious
problem; I've been avoiding upgrading all my files for the past few
weeks.

> 1) All my piano scores produce mighty complaints after conversion:
> 
> K517-2.ly:14:7: error: syntax error, unexpected \header
> 
>        \header {

A \score must now begin with music.  If you stick the \header{} at the
bottom of the \score block, you'll be fine.

No idea how to automate this, but I've added a note to the docs.


> K517-2.ly:17:8: error: syntax error, unexpected \context
> 
>         \context PianoStaff <<

Moving the header fixed this problem -- at least, in Scarlatti K25,
once I moved the \header I didn't see problems like this.

> 2) convert-ly has a mistaken way of detecting features--I have a
> score with a *commented* line as follows:
> 
>         % #(override-auto-beam-setting '(end * * * *) 1 2 'Staff)
> 
> convert-ly complains as follows:
> 
> Not smart enough to convert auto beam settings

IMO this complaint makes sense -- what if you decided to un-comment
that line after updating the file?  It wouldn't compile, and you
wouldn't know why.

If there's a big call for it, it probably wouldn't be hard to add a
flag to convert-ly which made it ignore comments.  But such a flag
should also cause a warning to appear (about exactly this situation).

> 4) Previously working tempo indications are not converted and do not
> work any longer:
> 
> p-gruppi-2.ly:45:16: error: unknown escaped string: `\tempo4'
>         \midi {
>                 \tempo4=160 }

Are you sure that this isn't just a typo?  \tempo 4=160 works fine;
I'm surprised that \tempo4 ever worked.
 
Cheers,
- Graham