Re: help

[Carl Sorensen]

han-wen wrote:

> On 28-Jul-04, at 9:31 AM, David wrote:
> > I have downloaded lilypond, but don't know how to install it, open it, 
> > or use it. (whichever I'm supposed to do next after downloading)  
> > Help!!!!
>
> What operating system are you using?  And have you read the 
> instructions on the website?  Lilypond is not the kind of program you 
> can use without reading the documentation.

Although I understand this remark, I dislike it, because it points to
a weakness of ours.

How much work is installing lily4jedit?  If we can get the new windows
users to get acquainted with lily through its wizard for score
creation, I suspect that we could get even more people hooked.


Carl writes:

The main problem with lilypond as a windows program is that it depends on
cygwin.  Most windows systems don't have cygwin.  People in the Windows
environment are used to downloading a setup.exe file that you double click
on and it automatically installs everything, such that you have an icon on
the desktop ready to click and go.

Cygwin is a different beast.  The installation (using setup.exe) actually
works quite smoothly, but you have to decide which packages to install,
then you install cygwin and lilypond, then you have to go to some different
(not part of lilypond) text editor to edit the files (such as jedit).  If
you're a Windows user and not a programmer, the whole cygwin thing just
doesn't have a typical "Windows" feel to it.

If there were a way to have a customized lilypond version of cygwin's
setup.exe, with the appropriate packages automatically selected, so that
we could just tell users to click on next, and next, and next..., then
I think the installation could be better.  And if we could get it so that
jedit with lilypond mode showed up not as an all purpose editor, but as
a user interface for lilypond that could coincidentally do text editing,
then I think it would be even closer to a Windows app.  Now, if we could 
just avoid all of the problems with making sure TeX is set up right...

Bottom line, IMO, as long as lilypond is a linux/unix based program, I see
it as very hard to get it into the Windows mainline.  However, things are 
_much_ better on the Windows front in 2.2.x than they were in 1.8.x.

Just my two cents,

Carl Sorensen