On 23-Jun-99 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> chris, since you seem to be new here (i'm fairly old, but back after
> a long absence :), i just wanted to make sure you were aware of the
> work i did on a lilypond web interface. it's available at:
>
> http://plaything.smart.net/cgi-bin/lilypond_cgi.pl
>
> (my home machine on a particularly crappy dial-up connection, so try
> again later if it's not working.)
I didn't know about it - thanks for letting me know. I had a quick try
(you were obviously online at the time!) with just a one liner and it
was very impressive.
> there are two reasons it never went up on a 24/7 machine: the
> machine i was going to put it on has had some hardware problems, and
> (more importantly) people were concerned that there were unaddressed
> security problems. the request was made that the script should
> accept only that which is permissible instead of checking for that
> which isn't. this meant figuring out what constituted an acceptable
> line of mudela. since i couldn't even think of where to begin with
> that, the project has remained unfulfilled.
I don't profess to know much (anything) about security but surely
lilypond would just reject the mudela if it wasn't valid. Or would this
somehow allow somebody to gain access to the machine it was running on?
> you can read the plans i had for it at:
>
> http://pobox.com/~jeff.covey/scores-archive.html
Have done - it looks like it could be potentially useful for someone
who doesn't have the time to keep an updated version of Lilypond on
their machine but has a permanent (or cheap!) internet connection -
they would just be able to plug their script in and have a gif/ps etc.
output.
The other use which is possibly more interesting from my point of view
is that on a fast machine it could be used to generate the downloadable
(ps, pdf) files for Mutopia "on the fly" so that you could specify a
page size, and any other requirements and the file would be built
instantly for you. This would have the added bonus that only the .ly
files would need to be stored on the server - reducing the space
required by large amounts (it's the ps and pdf files that that most of
the space). Unfortunately I don't think this is feasible at the moment,
and possibly never will be as the processing power needed for such a
machine to produce ps/pdf files of large scores within a few seconds
would be huge, and even more if several people wanted to access it at
the same time.
> since you're still in the early stage of writing the cgi for mutopia,
> would you be interested in incorporating this code into it in the
> ways i describe at the above url?
My main problem is that I don't have access to a machine permanently
connected to the net. Currently the (very bad) cgi script is sitting on
borrowed hired web space (!) on a machine with only Perl 4. Hopefully
very soon I will be moving it onto some space hired by me on a machine
with Perl 5. But hired web space is expensive so putting something like
Lilypond on this machine is out of the question.
Also the current plans are for the cgi-script(s) to allow searching and
sorting, but not much else. Continuing on from what you've done is
probably too difficult for me anyway!
I think if you do get a chance to develop your idea, though, and find a
machine to sit it on then it would be excellent for general Lilypond
usage for anyone, and not just Mutopia.
Chris
--
Chris Sawer - Sussex, England - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
