Re: What did I stupidly wrong?

[Mats Bengtsson]

> Dear Sir/Madam:

(This is a mailing list, so you will reach a number of readers. I
also urge you to keep all possible followups on the mailing list.)

> I did install to my Win98 machine the 'cygwin|lilypond' combo - and 
> the result is less than satisfactory. Obviously I have missed 
> something, or otherwise made something stupid - but I don't see, how 
> I can resolve the problem without your kind help. Please...
>
> Please find attached the bug-report, and all the information 
> surrounding this error - itself the runtime error list, the list of 
> the system variables, even the python -v listing, and the relevant 
> Windows set-up and ini files. I do hope, that's enough... :-)

More than enough, it took quite some time to find anything that
looked like a problem.

> /usr/lib/python2.3/pre.py:94: DeprecationWarning: Please use the 're' module, 
> not the 'pre' module
>   DeprecationWarning)
> Running LilyPond...
> GNU LilyPond 1.6.11
> Now processing: `run-test.ly'
> Parsing...
> /home/admin/run-test.ly:1:22: error: syntax error, unexpected '(':
> \score { \notes { c4-(
>                         c4-) } }

The problem you see here is the incompatibility between different
versions of LilyPond. Clearly, you have installed version 1.6.11, but
your example file run-test.ly seems to be written in the syntax of
version 1.8 or newer. You have to follow the documentation of the
version you have installed. (However, having said that, I recommend
to browse through the tutorial of 1.8 since it has been significantly
improved compared to that of 1.6 and most of the basics remain the
same.) At www.lilypond.org, you will find the documentation
corresponding to both version 1.6 and 1.8 (as well as the development
version 1.9).

Also, I recommend to always add a line such as
\version "1.6.11"
to your files, both to help you remember what LilyPond version
you had installed when you wrote the particular file but primarily
to be able to use the program convert-ly to automatically update
your file to a newer version of Lilypond when you upgrade.

   /Mats