Re: Could we do something to promote convert-ly?

[David Kastrup]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> writes:
>
>> Folks,
>>
>> I am getting tired at the number of questions of the type
>> "Why doesn't this work anymore?" which can be answered by
>> "Just Run convert-ly! (TM)". I suspect that the effort we
>> put in crafting convert-ly rules is not paying in perceived
>> backwards compatibility as users don't think about running
>> convert-ly, or perhaps don't even know about it. Could we
>> do something to change this?
>>
>> Some ideas:
>>
>> - Mention it in release announcements,
>> - Mention it in the Changes document,
>> - When the score produces an error and the \version
>>   statement is for a different minor version number,
>>   print a warning ("compilation failed and \version
>>   statement is outdated, did you update syntax with
>>   convert-ly?" or something like that).
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> Different major number.  Possibly also odd major number and different
> minor number, but I guess stable releases are done frequently enough
> these days that it's unlikely a distribution will package an unstable
> one.

An extra bit of work would be maintaining a list of regexps since the
last major version that would trigger the message, with the message
always being triggered for a major version change.  If we want to avoid
calling a Python interpreter, the regexps should likely be Guile
regexps.

-- 
David Kastrup