Re: Lilypond Python on Windows

[Dewdman42]

I just want to add to this thread.  I think anything older than Windows95 is
pointless to worry about supporting.  In fact, even Windows95/98 can almost
be declared dead.  WinXP is so far superior to those.  Indeed, from reading
the threads it appears a general sense of frustration on the part of the
linux developers trying to support blindly some windows env issues.  I
actually feel your pain.  I think the issues related to spaces in the
pathnames are completely solvable, particularly with anything newer than
Win95 and quite possibly including win95 also.  I certainly think its
reasonable to provide BAT files or other wrappers and specify that they are
only compatible on certain newer versions of windows.  Perhaps you don't
care so much, but there are many many non-linux users out there that might
use lilypond if it were just a TINY bit easier to get up and going without
requiring a moderately high level of technical knowledge to figure out stuff
like this.

People have been dealing with win installation issues for many years,
including the dreaded space in "Program Files" and how to have the installer
query the machine at install time to find out what it needs to find out.  

I can certainly understand if the linux guys here are burned out on trying
to perfect this.  I will try to figure it out.  I will need to understand
more about python though and how the lilypond installation is supposed to
work with it.  So please fill me in.  

It looks to me that lilypond installs its own copy of python and all library
dependencies into the lilypond dir.  This is, I suppose, to ensure 100%
compatability.  Understandably, some people may have a different version of
python installed on their machine, including with different versions of the
libraries.  So question, how does python determine where the libraries are? 
If someone types "python" on the command line, then the PATH variable will
look for the first instance of python.exe.  But as Python is running, how
does it know where to look for libraries?

Also, I saw some comments about file name associations related to python and
lilypond.  I agree that if possible the lilypond version of python should
NOT be the default associated application to launch py files. What other
file associations are made and what was the reason for doing this?  Perhaps
I can think of another way to work around it without having to associate the
lilypond version of python.exe with py files, etc..  

It sounds like this association was made in an attempt to make it possible
to launch a py file directly.  I think for the sake of lilypond, this is not
a good idea since lilypond relies on its own version of python being
installed on the machine.  All of the lilypond internals and scripts which
need to run python should launch its local copy of python with an explicit
path name and without any reliance on file name associations.  (Leave that
alone in case someone is going to install a full python env on their win
machine).  

Anyway, I'll try to pick through the various threads and figure it out, but
if someone has any info about the current architecture of lilypond launching
python, how python finds the libraries it needs, etc..you could save me a
lot of time to understand the issues.

thanks

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