Re: How to build LilyPond.app on macOS?

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 07:25:44PM +0100, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Dear Graham,
> 
> On 6 December 2016 at 19:01, Graham Percival wrote:
> > This is compiled and uploaded to:
> > http://lilypond.org/downloads/gub-sources/osx-lilypad-universal/osx-lilypad-universal-0.6.3.tar.gz
> > and then GUB downloads that, inserts the cross-compiled
> > command-line binary, and packages it.
> 
> I can luckily skip that part :)
> Including instructions to fetch Python 2.6.
> (I really wonder why LilyPond nowadays ships with Python 2.6.)

Changing it to something else would require updating all our
scripts, cross-compiling the newer version of python on all 8 (or
so) architectures, and testing the whole thing.  This is a
non-trivial undertaking, especially since (ideally) the end result
is "things work exactly the way they did before spending 100 hours
on this task".

That's why technical debt is so hard to combat: it takes a lot of
effort, and there's usually no immediate payoff.  Sure, it would
help things in 1, 2, 5, or 10 years down the road.

> This is off-topic, but the idea of a package manager is usually to
> compile natively. I'm almost sure that Debian doesn't fetch your
> binaries either.

That is incorrect; Debian most definitely fetches pre-compiled
binaries.  Out of all the major Linux distributions, only gentoo
fetches source code and compiles it by default.

> > then adds some sort of GUI shell or editor.
> 
> Redesigning the GUI for LilyPond is something that would likely
> require more effort that I'm personally willing to spend for this.

Fair enough.

Cheers,
- Graham