Re: Lilypond 1.4.4 bugs and some (hopefully) helpful stuff

[William R. Brohinsky]

I'll quote the whole series as it came back this last time to get this
back into the list!

Mats Bengtsson wrote:
> 
> > Mats Bengtsson wrote:
> > > In the meantime, I recommend people who experience any problems
> > > with the Lilypond installation to first install MiKTeX and
> > > Ghostscript+friends manually and then run the Lilypond
> > > installation script.
> > >
> > >   /Mats
> > >
> >
> > Unfortunately, the problems I was fixing with these efforts came
> > directly as a result of having installed MiKTeX and Ghostscript+amici
> > using the windws native installers. They were installed when I first
> > installed 1.4.2 (the first cygwin version of lilypond): their path
> > settings and registry entries interfered with the 1.4.2 installation.
> 
> I understand that you could get into trouble if you already
> had MiKTeX and Ghostscript installed and let the Lilypond installer
> install newer version. However, if you tell the Lilypond installer
> to keep the current versions of these programs it shouldn't change
> anything in the registry settings. The path settings might have
> been wrong in 1.4.2 but should hopefully be correct now.
> (For the record: the first cygwin version of lilypond was 1.3.something)
> 
> > Part of this problem was that some of the path additions for 1.4.2
> > humbly added themselves to the back end of the path string. While this
> > is quite polite, it meant that I was getting some executables and
> > support files from cygwin, and some from windows.
> 
> That shouldn't be a problem as long as you only have one
> copy of MiKTeX + Ghostscript installed. There are some
> variable settings to let TeX find the Lilypond fonts and some
> other files, but that should just add on to the existing
> installation.
> 
> > When I uninstalled everything in an orderly manner (last goes first) I
> > ended up (without knowing or noticing) with entries for
> > no-longer-existing directories in the path statement and lots of entries
> > in the registry.
> >
> > So I'd have to conclude that really bad things can happen when you've
> > installed anything by hand and then install lilypond using the cygwin
> > installer over it.
> 
> I agree completely! If you want to update any of the Windows programs
> using the Lilypond installer, you should carefully remove the older
> version first. That's another reason I suggest to always use the
> native installers instead of the Lilypond simplistic installation
> procedure, for these programs.
> 
> > Or possibly I'm misinterpreting what you mean with installing manually?
> 
> Not at all. I have Ghostscript and an old MiKTeX version installed
> using the native installers on my PC at home and haven't experienced
> any of the problems you've met. I've been careful to let the Lilypond
> installer keep the existing versions, though, mainly to save downloading
> time, but after your warnings, I have another good reason to keep them.
> 
>     /Mats
> 
> P.S. Why not keep this discussion on the mailing list, I think it's
> of interest for other Lilypond users as well?