[Foundation-l] Strategy document?

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Fri, 10/10/08, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Strategy document?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, October 10, 2008, 12:59 AM
> On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Nikola Smolenski
> <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> > On Friday 10 October 2008 01:07:28 Gregory Maxwell
> wrote:
> >> How do you draw slurs in abc? (Trick question...)
> Saying abc is a
> >> replacement for lilypond is like saying that plain
> text is a
> >> replacement for LaTeX math, strictly correct but
> with significant
> >> compromises.
> >>
> >> The right thing to do is to offer a limited subset
> of the language
> >> just as we don't allow SVG+js.
> >
> > However, for years, no one is able to offer that
> limited subset.
> 
> I don't know that anyone has bothered trying, or at
> least I know that
> I haven't.  I had been under the impression that the
> blocker was the
> general architecture of the WikiTeX stuff which had nothing
> to do with
> lilypond. The scheme stuff should be relatively straight
> forward to
> disallow.
> 

Are you saying that you now plan to bother trying?  

I am sure that there are tons of cool things that can be done with different kinds of software if only developers would volunteer the time to work on the issues.  Nikola is volunteering to work on abc and other developers seem to respond with "but Lilypond is cooler"   All I know is Wikisource has been getting requests for music for years. After my prodding, I had been told that it is up to Lilypond to fix their issues before WMF will consider enabling the software.  None of our devs seem willing to make Lilypond work. The bug has been open for 4 years. If we have someone volunteering to get abc working for Wikisource, what is the issue?  Whatever the defects, it is a great improvement over page scans. 


Birgitte SB