Re: Issue 1635 in lilypond: clean up misleading warnings in website build

[lilypond]

Comment #8 on issue 1635 by percival.music.ca: clean up misleading warnings  
in website build
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1635

Depends what you mean by "as you're no doubt aware".  I'm aware that the  
message which is printed to screen claims that a file was not found.

I am *not* aware, or convinced, that:
- the file actually is not there.  (somebody could have screwed up an "if"  
statement, or forgotten to assign a value to the right variable, etc).
- the file is actually supposed to be there.  (maybe it's not relevant to  
the website build?  if the website looks ok, then that's pretty good  
evidence that the "missing" file doesn't matter!)
- the file is actually supposed to be there at that point in the build.   
(maybe the missing file is created at a later stage, and after that later  
stage, extract*.py is run again?  trust me, I've seen bigger screw-ups than  
that in our build system!)
- we don't have a missing directory in the arguments.  (maybe the file was  
created perfectly well, or exists in git, but the search path is missing  
one directory... this is particularly common when combined with relative  
directories.  If the build is started at a different directory, one of the  
relative paths could be wrong by a single ../ and then it won't find  
anything)

At this point, you know as much as I -- the only extra "wisdom" that I can  
pass along is that our build system is a complete load of duct tape and  
prayer.  We've seen 3 or 4 "generations" of people working on this, each  
person not really understanding what the previous people did, and (in my  
case at least) not really caring.  I was particularly sloppy in the  
translation stuff, since my understanding was that other people were going  
to handle the translation infrastructure.


Do not trust that the code does what it claims to be doing.  Do not trust  
that whatever the code claims to be doing, is the right thing to do.  Do  
not trust that the previous authors knew more about this stuff than you  
do.  etc.

The bottom line is that (AFAIK) when you type "make website" you get a  
functional website in out-website/website/.  Treat everything else with  
caution.  Including this advice.  :)