Re: compilation error

[Reuben Thomas]

Mats observed:

> Of course it would be nice to be able to view pictures with
> examples also in the info version of the document, but I see
> absolutely no reason for LilyPond to be a pioneer for this
> feature.

This is a very sensible observation. LilyPond is a music typesetter, hence
I'm happy to have to install new or development packages for typesetting
or music related systems to build it. Since it's complex and has scripting
support, I similarly don't mind that bit. But it does seem pretty stupid
to have to install a new texinfo and new autotools.

Having said that, there are steps one can take to improve the situation a
lot.

The biggest one is to have binary distributions that are statically linked
and can run in-place. This would help a lot of users who don't otherwise
have access to pre-built packages without requiring them to build
anything. It's an approach that has lost favour as more formal packaging
systems have grown, but this lack makes many users fall between two
stools: if they have a very common system with a prepackaged binary, or
the expertise and time to build from source, they're fine; otherwise,
they're stuffed.

NEdit (www.nedit.org) is one major application that takes this approach to
great effect (it has similarly awkward build dependencies such as Motif,
which historically pretty much forced it to distribute static binaries).

Also, users who must build LilyPond for some reason (e.g. they want to
contribute code) can help themselves by using 3rd party repositories for
their distributions that contain most of the build dependencies. I think
the only thing I actually had to build on my Fedora Core system before I
could build (pre-2.1.28) LilyPond was mftrace. Even this can be built as
an RPM, and I'm happy to post my mftrace RPM somewhere convenient if that
would be helpful.

I'll be as happy as the next user to get pictures in info files (it should
make them as useful as the HTML manual but with the superior browsing
environment of Emacs), but I'm also content to wait until my system
actually supports that out of the box.

-- 
http://www.mupsych.org/~rrt/ | fantasize, a.  as big as fizzy orange