Re: Issue 1933 in lilypond: Lilypond-book requires msvcrt again

[lilypond]

Comment #14 on issue 1933 by address@hidden: Lilypond-book requires  
msvcrt again
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1933

After having spent some time studying this issue, I am not sure if it is  
tractable to maintain Python as part of the Lilypond distribution.  Every  
website I've read that talks about compiling python for Windows  
distributions contains horror stories.  Furthermore, the devel review  
process cannot possibly test that every change made to a python script  
works on Windows, which means that this type of bug may show up well after  
the problem is introduced, causing us to potentially have to swim way  
upstream to fix it.

If our logic was that modifying the PATH is something that Windows users of  
lilypond-book will be intelligent enough to do, I don't see why we cannot  
point them to python.org.  The command lilypond-book should be written as a  
shell script that first verifies the existence of python and, if it is not  
there, alerts the user that she needs to download python from  
www.python.org.  Otherwise, it calls python lilypond-book.py etc..

I doubt that we will lose a single user by doing this, but we will gain  
developer resources.