I haven't posted an update to this blog in a long time. Well, I've been very busy with school; last term, I accompanied approximately 20 people, so that occupied much of my time.
My work with LilyPond has slowed down a little bit, but there is still a lot to do. The release manager, Graham, wants to release a new stable release 2.14 ASAP, but I'm not quite sure when that will really happen. There are still many critical issues to resolve; I want to help out more with this, but most of them are "over my head". Time invested in discovering solutions to one of these bugs might take me 20 hours, whereas the person who originally introduced the bug might be able to fix it in a half hour. Oh well, we'll get them fixed eventually.
I'm happy to report that LilyPond's SVG output is "production ready". Actually, it has been for a few months, but I haven't discovered any bugs besides this one. Honestly though, it's not too critical of a bug. I have a feeling most people will be using the SVG output for snippets less than a page long, so those use cases are not affected.
For now, my plans are to leave the SVG backend as is, unless I find a fix for #971. After 2.14 is out, then I'll start thinking about it again.
Some of my more immediate LilyPond goals:
- Add a new markup command, "path", that uses SVG path primitives and works for both the PS and SVG backends.
- Fix slur ugliness. My previous attempt to fix these issues failed not because I was off-track, but because a proper solution needs to be more comprehensive. If I claim to have fixed slurs, LilyPond users will really want them to be fixed (and beautiful).
- Port LilyPond to Guile (soon to be) 2.0.
- Start fixing bugs in librsvg, and in the far-off future, consider becoming the maintainer of this project. The entire GNU/Linux community will benefit from improvements to librsvg. All of GNOME uses this library, as well as other important programs like ImageMagick. I am so confused why it is not currently being maintained. :-(
