>>>>> "taral" == taral <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
taral> On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 06:14:17PM -0400, Laura Conrad wrote:
>> I agree, but what I want to hear is not so much about new features but
>> a willingness to consider non-standard behavior as a bug (except for
>> documented extensions), and a willingness to fix bugs even if they
>> only affect other people's music.
taral> Explain?
Some not-so-ancient history:
We had (have?) a standards committee, composed primarily of
developers of widely-used ABC applications. When discussing
the addition of relatively minor new features, some of them
said "I wouldn't ever use that." Some of them said, "That's
OK, you don't have it implement it just because it's in the
standard." One of them, when faced with a situation where his
code clearly behaved differently from the specification of the
current standard, provided a %% statement (not even a command
line option) which would cause the behavior to be correct, so
as not to "break" the ABC of people relying on the previous
incorrect behavior.
Also, there are several bugs in abc2ps which I've been reporting for
several years now. I have yet to see a report of any of them being
fixed in any relative of abc2ps.
So I refuse to get excited about an ABC application just because it
implements new, potentially useful features. What we need is a
developer who is going to:
Use open source, so that anyone can fix bugs.
Roll contributions from other people into the source.
Implement the standard as written.
Clearly label any extensions to the standard used by the
program.
Write code that can be worked on by multiple people. The fact
that abc2ps isn't written this way is probably one of the
major reasons for the situation described above.
taral> libabc is going to be quite strict, especially about
taral> headers. I'm probably going to have to provide an "abcfix"
taral> program that attempts to "standardize" non-compliant abc
taral> files. Is this what you mean?
It's a start. In my opinion, there should also be a --strict option
which disabled any extensions.
--
Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097 fax: (801) 365-6574
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139
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