Re: LSR in dismission

[CCing 'lilypond-devel']


Hello Sebastiano,

> the LSR is officially in dismission. I'm moving all my services to
> some new hardware, and LSR won't be part of the move.  I'll keep
> around the old hardware for a few months, but then I'll turn it off.
> 
> LSR has been useful, I'm sure, for a lot of people, but by now you
> can more easily ask to any AI information like that provided by the
> LSR.  At this point I simply don't have the time to maintain it, and
> I haven't been using Lilypond in almost 10 years.
> 
> Moving the service is a nightmare because the LSR uses more than a
> dozen different technologies that must be all configured and
> synchronized.  Some of those technologies rely on obsolete libraries
> that have become very difficult to integrate.
> 
> Of course, if someone wants to install and maintain the whole thing
> elsewhere I can assist.

Thanks for the heads-up – and thanks for taking care of the LSR for
such a long time!

IMHO, the LSR is indispensable for the LilyPond community, and I don't
think that AI is a viable replacement, especially if you want to
browse examples or see them rendered.  Alas, I have zero experience
with writing interactive HTML code that is run on a server...

Anyway, here are some ideas.

* Use 'lsr.lilypond.org' as a new URL.

* Set up the LSR itself as a git repository, mainly to not lose the
  history of snippets (which seems to be the case right now, AFAIK).
  From this, a database for searching could be generated on the fly if
  necessary.

* The code for a new LSR interface should be put into a repository,
  too.  Given that the LSR is probably not a high-traffic site, I
  could imagine to use gitlab itself for servicing.  I don't know
  whether this is possible, though.

We should probably ask for help on the 'lilypond-user' mailing list,
too; you don't need deep LilyPond knowledge for the LSR itself.


    Werner