Re: Bundling Lilypond with project

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 20 août 2022 à 05:41, DoubleFelix <doublef3lix@gmail.com> a écrit :



Hello,

I'm making a python application that uses LilyPond, but in order to make it completely portable, I need to bundle LilyPond with my application. It's licensed under GPL, so if I'm reading this right I should be able to do that as long as I make my own project GPL (already done).

I *think* that the mere act of bundling LilyPond in the app would not be legally different from distributing your app and requiring that LilyPond be installed separately (IANAL). Cf https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem

I just want to double check I'm correct, and if I am, how can I minimize file-sizes when it comes to distributing the binaries? All I use is the lilypond command to compile a ly file into an SVG, none of the other bundled tools.

For a start, if you’re doing this, I would recommend using 2.23 (unstable series) binaries, because they’re static, and can be relocated at will. Also, the directory layout is the same on all platforms, and they already don’t contain a minimalistic GUI like the 2.22 binaries do for macOS and Windows.

I think you should be able to reduce the size by removing the Python interpreter, it’s needed for scripts (musicxml2ly, convert-ly, lilypond-book, etc) but not for the core lilypond command. Also remove GhostScript if you only need SVG only, it’s needed to convert PS to PDF.

Finally, you will likely be interested in the brand new Cairo-based backend, which is a lot faster than the traditional SVG backend. Support in the official binaries is not there yet but should come very soon with the 2.23.12 release. See

https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/merge_requests/913

HTH

Jean