Re: OLL

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi,

Am 10.10.20 um 15:39 schrieb Andrew Bernard:
> Since Urs has stepped down from OLL work for personal reasons, as
> somebody who has written code for OLL, and contributed some snippets
> of some utility, I have been considering taking it all over. I have
> proposed to make a new domain openlilylib.space, move to Gitlab.
> establish a website on my personal Linux servers at my own expense,
> and add much more documentation and morenad try to communicate the use
> and utility of OLL to end users.
>
> I have written to a few of the members of the list and perhaps it is
> too soon but I have only heard back from one person. There have been
> no contributions for some time. And now suddenly the thread about
> licencing has risen again, a topic which I find absurd and I would
> refuse to countenance it for any OLL work ongoing that I would be
> doing. It seems that thread is trying to actively discourage OLL use.
>
> Like Urs, I get the impression that the effort on OLL is not worth the
> return, as hardly anybody seems to use it and there appears to be
> little interest. This is very disappointing. So, may I ask - it is
> worth me continuing the development and maintenance of OLL?

I'm only now catching up on what happened on lilypond-user over the last 
few days.

OLL is great, important and absolutely worth to be kept alive & around! 
I see mainly two issues as crucial:

1) *Availability*: By now, it's reasonably easy to install a working 
Frescobaldi + LilyPond environment on a given computer (Linux, Windows; 
I don't know much about OS X). For OLL, an additional download, dealing 
with file locations, adding LilyPond parameters etc. are required.

These steps are trivial in themselves, but they nevertheless make for 
enough of a barrier that, for example, I myself never got around to 
trying it up until very recently. (And I have no trouble cloning a git 
repository.)

If I remember correctly, Urs had plans of adding functionality to 
Frescobaldi to download, install and integrate OLL automatically. I 
think this should be a foremost focus for anybody wanting to help with 
OLL: This could improve the user base vastly!

(Of course, the obvious alternative would be to integrate OLL into 
LilyPond proper. But IIRC, there are obstacles to this?)

2) *Documentation*: No need to explain this. (But I think most of the 
packages have quite nice example files, at least.)

I'm afraid I'm not enough of a python programmer to contribute 
substantially to 1). But maybe someone on this list feels up to it?

Lukas