> But what is the point of this high-level interface? Surely,
> arabic.ly should be the obvious entry point.
It's similar to note name language support in LilyPond: We don't say
\include "language.ly"
Instead, we rather have
\include "deutsch.ly"
or
\include "italiano.ly"
The same holds for Arabic: As described in the documentation changes
of MR !1783 you should say
\include "arabic.ly"
if you want Italian-based note names for inputting Arabic music, and
\include "hel-arabic.ly"
if you want English-based note names with customized, Italian-like
alteration suffixes.
MR !1783 tries to unify some common code of the two files, nothing
more. There are probably more clean-ups coming to move the remaining
maqam extensions in `hel-arabic.ly` to `arabic.ly`, too – or not, I'm
not an expert.
> All I can surmise is that arabic.ly was not fit for purpose, so
> Hassan worked on hel-arabic.ly to address limitations and
> shortcomings.
I'm not aware of limitations or shortcomings.
Werner
