point-and-click default

[David Zelinsky]

I'm about to rant about an existing Lilyond default.  Really I want to
suggest a change for the developers, but I'm not sure where or how to do
that.  So I'll start with this rant, and I'll be happy to take any more
productive steps if someone can suggest what they should be.  Or, if
this issue has been previosly debated, I'd be interested to have a link
to that discussion.

Here goes...

I've been using Lilypond for a few years, and only yesterday learned
about the point-and-click feature in pdf output.  In particular, I had
no idea that by default Lilypond includes absolute pathnames to local
source files on my system as metadata in the pdf output files.  So when
I uploaded a couple of files to IMSLP recently, that metadata was
available for all to see.

Having learned (from my son!) about this feature, I have now found it in
the manual, and I now know how to disable it.  And I have replaced the
publicly available files with new ones that do not have the
metadata--and are also half the size!

This point-and-click seems like a useful feature for editing, *if* it's
configured to work on your system.  But it apparently is not usually set
up that way by default, at least on most Linux systems.  (I do
appreciate the instructions in the manual for configuring it, and plan
to do that.)

But even if it is configured to work, it seems like a REALLY BAD IDEA to
have this feature enabled *by default*.  Or, if it is to be the default,
it ought to be mentioned VERY PROMINENTLY, so anyone installing and
using Lilypond will see it.  As far as I could tell, it is not even
mentioned in the Learning Manual.

The reference manual does admonish users to disable the feature when
producing pdf output for public distribution.  But that warning is
totally useless if a user does not happen to read that (rather obsure)
section of the manual.


-- 
David  Zelinsky