Re: Why is it _still_ so freaking hard to get info with images?

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Op zaterdag 14-03-2009 om 15:31 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef David
Kastrup:

> If compiling Lilypond from source with default
> settings means not getting the full docs, this is what all major
> distributions will distribute

So what we need to change is for

    make [all|default]

to also make web.  We should also have a target for building a minimal 
running lilypond -- without the docs.

This is actually what the SCons build did, everything on default,
scons minimal would only build binaries, python, and fonts.

Your point about README/INSTALL is more difficult to tackle.  While
I agree it would be nice to have those file available at toplevel--
just as they are in the distributed tarballs--it is a pain (not to
say stupid) to have generated files in GIT.

What we possibly could do, is have README and INSTALL be symlinks in GIT
to the readme/install texi sources.

The problems with fixing a build system is that it is a major time sink
without any obvious benefits, very hard to get right (for a big project
like lilypond) and with a number of conflicting constraints (speed vs
correctness, etc.) and it's a very personal thing, everyone wants
something else, wants to use the build system they already know
very well (from work or wherever), doesn't care so much about speed, 
or correctness, or cross-building or using yet another undocumented
language or out of tree builds or building in other ide's or...  Unless
maybe you use the full standard autotools suite, which *everyone* hates 
to work with.

Han-Wen and I spent far too much time with the stepmake system, which we
failed to get into GNU make or grow into a succesful separate project
(now, 10 years later there's finally a somewhat similar effort in 
http://code.google.com/p/quagmire ).

I started a SCons build system a couple of years ago, which is
much easier to write (no m4+auto*+makefile+shell+external tools 
messiness), *much* smaller in LOC, debug (you can just insert python
statements to print anything about the state of the build and 
dependencies), fix and maintain but noone else put any effort in that 
and it bitrotted and was dropped recently.  We never commited to it
because "the old system worked" and the scons build took 4 seconds
to determine the build was up to date.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org