Re: survey on multiple development versions

[David Kastrup]

Mike Solomon <address@hidden> writes:

> On Dec 10, 2013, at 6:32 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Refactoring the page building into a stage where its basic operations
>> can be done from Scheme/LilyPond would be a first big step towards being
>> able to experiment with different schemes without recompilation.
>> 
>> The next big step would be to create a modular structure where it is not
>> necessary to replace the page builder for a feature like footnotes, but
>> where you can plug in elements like footnotes by writing code for them
>> and plugging this code into a single, extensible page builder with
>> appropriate interfaces.
>> 
>> Then we can have, without recompilation, tools that provide smarter
>> footnotes, different layouts of them, margin notes and other stuff
>> without interfering with other tools available for the page composition.
>
> I agree that this is a great candidate for refactoring.  I think one
> way to frame the problem would be to imagine that someone wanted to
> take on this task, which is pretty ambitious and would likely require
> a lot of subtasks in extracting out the page breaker.  Each of these
> subtests would require independent verification, and it is likely that
> the entire project could be done separately from the main branch.  It
> would probably require extensive user testing to make sure that all
> the kinks were ironed out.
>
> Let’s say that I set up a version of LilyPond called
> modular-footnote-LilyPond in which I develop this modularity.  How, if
> at all, can users test this before it makes it into the development
> version?

Uh, not really?  That was sort of my point.  Refactoring into extensible
form is a prerequisite to development of features that are not tightly
tied into a particular binary, requiring its recompilation.

But there won't be significant resistance to that kind of work while we
are in the unstable phase of a development version.

-- 
David Kastrup