Re: compiling

[Graham Percival]

Joe Neeman wrote:
> I'm not sure how many of these are still a problem, but the main problem I've 
> had in the past is that lilypond depends on versions of other programs that 
> aren't always in a distribution's repositories.
>   
Yeah.  For example, Debian _still_ doesn't have guile-1.8.2 or higher.  
Not even in the unstable branch!  I think this was released about a year 
ago.  :(
If I were to try compiling lilypond, I'd have to compile/install guile 
myself (either apply the rational bugfix to 1.8.1, or do .2).
> On my current machine, I installed guile, ghostscript and mftrace manually 
> before I could build lilypond (and guile also needed to be patched). Ok, 
> so "involved" might be an exaggeration, but lilypond is a little fussy about 
> its build environment.
>   
With good reason, I think -- once we find a bug in the underlying 
libraries, it doesn't make sense to try to work around that bug in our 
own code.  But that does mean that we have to wait a year (or more) 
before those underlying projects release new versions and get packaged 
for major distributions.

Cheers,
- Graham