Hi!
Something simply has to be done about lily's speed!
I'm still working on the same piano score I've been testing
lily on for the past five weeks. Why all the time? Because
lily takes well over an hour to process the .ly file, which
is a relatively simple, 223 bar piece. I've encountered
some resource hogs in my time (Netscape springs to mind),
but right now, lily beats all! I can recompile my kernel in
less time than it takes lily to process my score. Twice! --
and that's no joke. And while lily is busy with my file,
my computer is so crippled that I can't do anything else.
Over an hour to process each set of changes -- at this rate,
I'll be dead before I see paper copy of my music.
I understand that typesetting music is a complex business. I'm
both a typographer and a musician. But over an hour each time I
change something? It's too much.
I also realise that I'm resource challenged. I only have a P100
with 24 megs of memory. Funny thing, though--that same P100
with 24 megs, while a bit sluggish for some things, performs
just fine when running make, does an adequate job with complex
images in gimp, even handles Navigator without too much
performance loss. So why the utterly absurd torpor of lily?
For whatever it's worth, I've run lily on a "naked" system (i.e.
daemonless and X-less), and it still takes over an hour for that
same score.
If I sound a bit peeved here, I am. Overall, from the point of
view of a user, lily's concept is miles ahead of the
competition. The syntax is easy to master, and provides the
kind of precise control a serious musician needs. Well, mostly. :)
She makes pretty intelligent decisions on her own, and when she
doesn't, it's relatively easy to help her out. These things
indicate a hefty amount of smarts in her design.
But what use (especially in the GNU context), is a music
typesetter that can't be run on a computer such as mine?
A P100/24meg isn't exactly an old 386, where I'd expect these
hour+ waits. I'm poor. Extremely, right now. I haven't the
money to upgrade. And being forced to do so in order to run
"The GNU Typesetter" puts lily in the same league as those
Microsoft applications whose assumption is that everyone has
the avaiable cash (or credit) to upgrade their hardware every
couple of months.
OK -- this is a bit of a rant. I guess mostly I'm disappointed.
I was looking forward to contributing the lily project, not only
as a tester, but as someone who might take on the onerous task
of cleaning up and maintaining the documentation. Now it
appears I can't, until I upgrade, by which time I will no doubt
have forgotten most of what I've learned and have to start from
scratch again.
--
PTPi
Peter Schaffter
15, chemin Brunette, RR2 CP 406
Ste-Cécile-de-Masham (Québec)
CANADA J0X 2W0
A confirmed GNU/Linuxer. Sorry, I don't do Windows.
