On Dec 18, 2009, at 2:59 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
Kees van den Doel <[email protected]> writes:
Of course there is nothing really wrong with the current website.
Most people will want to just download lilypond and try it out; who
has time to read all the crap on a product's website? Once they've
clicked on the downloaded icon on their screen something reasonable
should happen.
Well, but Lilypond's whole operation is not "something
reasonable". If
they get what amounts to a demo run, that won't take them any
further in
the process of creating scores.
So the question is what action from the clicking on the "downloaded
icon" will be the fastest leading to the average unsuspecting user
writing and processing their first "Michael row the boat ashore"
kind of
file.
I have no good answer for that.
IMHO here is where we run into the issue of what LilyPond *is.* It's
a backend with no face, basically. This is something that most
Windows and Mac users will find hard to grasp initially, whereas Unix
users will be familiar with such things. To the extent that we want
to reach out to Windows and Mac users, we need to provide them with
some way to understand and be comfortable with that- otherwise they
will install it, double-click and say "where's the f*****g application?"
For this reason I like the idea of optionally bundling LilyPond with
various pre-configured text editors that are ready to go (as much as
possible). I'm leery of bundling Emacs because of the huge size of
the thing and there being so many different versions. For Emacs, I
think it might make sense to just bundle LilyPond and the code that
needs to be added to site-lisp and .emacs, aiming that at established
Emacs users. The other editors are easier for people to start with
and there's no good reason to present people with a double learning
curve.
I think this would be much more time- and resource-efficient than
trying to develop and maintain a GUI for LilyPond. Heck, maybe the
maintainers of the editors in question would do this as a cooperative
effort and make it just part of their default package.
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