Re: Windows laptop

[Hans Åberg]

> On 12 Feb 2022, at 10:50, Lukas-Fabian Moser <lfm@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> I neglected to consider the development releases. I feel so incompetent.
> No need to!
> 
> The term "development" (as opposed to "stable") tends to scare users away. 
> And while it is basically true that
> 
> - the development releases might have syntax changes (that might even be 
> changed again in later development releases)
> - the development releases reflect the current state of cutting-edge 
> development and therefore may contain changes that turn later out to be less 
> than ideal and have to be reverted,
> 
> in practice, the development releases are absolutely suited for everyday 
> production work. The reason is that there's a pretty rigid procedure for 
> adding new changes (commits, merge requests) to LilyPond which includes both 
> a thorough review and automated tests against a very extensive suite of 
> regression tests.

There is currently not so much difference, I would think, since you recently 
have changed version, making the current regular release the old development 
version.

> So, I've always thought that the juxtaposition of "stable" vs. "unstable" 
> releases on the LilyPond home page is not really ideal, as nobody wants to 
> have "unstable" software. But these releases are routinelly stable for use; 
> they're just not guaranteed to be stable in the sense of having frozen 
> feature sets.

I think the terms "development version" is better.

> But: With the newly created binaries for current MacOS, we're actually really 
> at the point where we talk about "new infrastructure, please test and report 
> back if you encounter problems". If you're willing to do that - and the 
> lilypond-user list is a great place for reporting back -, you should be good 
> to go with the new 2.23.6 release. Happy engraving!

The MacPorts version is though still using Guile 1.8, so there is not much 
experimentation there.