Re: Bundling Lilypond with project

[DoubleFelix]

So I'm looking at the download page and I don't see any downloads for the 2.23 binaries. Am I missing something, or do I need to compile them myself?

On Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 10:40 AM DoubleFelix <doublef3lix@gmail.com> wrote:

Awesome! Thank you! I've heard about the Cairo backend, but I kind of stopped once I found out I'd have to compile Lilypond on windows, mac, and linux myself. I have a windows machine, a linux VM, and a hackintosh, but even then the process seemed very in-depth so I gave up. However, I'm glad to hear that the release is approaching. Thank you so much for all this information. I also didn't know that 2.23 was static.

On Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 1:59 AM Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> wrote:

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