Re: Lily on OSX Leopard, problems running own build

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 09:47:06AM -0500, Neil Tiffin wrote:
> 1. Well I have offered, with the caveat that it is not trivial to  
> understand the non-standard build system.  No one was willing to walk me 
> through how it works or point me to some documentation explains the  
> build system.

Docs on the build system, as well as anybody understands it: see
the Contributor's Guide.

Docs on the GUB build system: there's a README floating around,
but that's it.


Now, what do we do about this situation?  If we all say "well, I
don't know how to fix it, and I'm not going to bother learning",
then nothing gets done.

> 2. I have an intel native GUI version downloaded from the internet that 
> works dated March 2008 version 2.12.  The fixes apparently were never 
> committed to the base and I do not remember where they came from.  But 
> someone knows what needs to be done.

As long as we all say "someone knows what needs to be done",
nothing happens.  Could you track down the patches?


We've had something like 2.5 years of people saying "I don't know
how to fix this, [and I'm not going to bother learning]".
Surprise surpise, nothing got fixed!

I'm not glossing over the effort involved.  It could take anywhere
from 10 hours to 200 hours to fix this, depending on how much you
know about whatever language(s) or operating system detail(s) are
involved.


Frankly, my preferred solution is just to document that you can
still use the command-line version perfectly well, and newbies
should use jEdit, and then maoing **delete** the GUI from the OSX
version.  I'm not convinced we should bother keeping the GUI in
the Windows version, either.  And if the Linux version has a GUI,
we should kill that.  Nobody should be using the default lilypond
editor.  The specialized ones (jedit) are incredibly better,
especially for newbies.  And advanced users probably have their
own favorite editor (vim if they're smart, emacs otherwise ;), so
there's no benefit to keeping lame, broken GUIs.

If you disagree (at least with OSX part), then please step up to
the plate and figure out why it's broken and how to fix it.  But
no, none of the current active developers know how it works, so
yes, you'll need to do a lot of reading the source and
investigating to figure it out.

Cheers,
- Graham