Re: must I build?

[Valentin Villenave]

2008/11/3 John Mangual <address@hidden>:
> When you write for Lilypond, can you use the pre-compiled version or must
> you build it youself?  And if you see a bug, how can you trace it?  I use
> lilypond a lot for my homework assignments, but I wanted to see how the
> compiler works.

Hi John,

The latest pre-compiled "development version" always include the
latest and greatest features, so there is definitely no need for you
to compile it, unless you're a) a geek b) a developer c) both :-)

Besides, LilyPond relies very much on high-level interpreted languages
(Scheme), so if you're trying to understand how LilyPond processes the
scores, you may want to have a look at the /scm directory that comes
with the pre-built distribution, or have a look at the output of
\displayMusic.

That being said, building LilyPond has become very easy under most
"big" Linux distributions, where there are packages available for
guile-devel, pango-devel etc. However, you'll need a recent
distribution with GCC >= 4.1.

As for bugs, most of the time they're engraving or syntax bugs and you
don't really need to "trace" them (running LilyPond with --verbose
argument may help). If you ever stumble upon a *major* bug (e.g.
segmentation fault) you may want to obatin a trace, but fortunately
this is not a common bug :-)

Cheers,
Valentin