Re: another 'wrong type argument' error

[David Wright]

On Mon 10 Oct 2022 at 12:06:11 (+0100), Wols Lists wrote:
> On 10/10/2022 06:43, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> > The problem isn’t LilyPond’s or its dependencies’ support for older macOS, 
> > which is better than even the system support. The real problem is Apple 
> > preventing you from upgrading your computer past a certain macOS version.
> 
> Which is probably down to newer versions of MacOS taking advantage of
> new chip features.
> 
> Linux drops support for older chips over time - it's almost impossible
> to get a distro that supports plain x86 any more ...

Hmm. My 2004 Acer Travelmate is currently running Debian/stable with
Linux acer 5.10.0-18-686 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.140-1 (2022-09-02) i686 GNU/Linux
and it can run FireFox, but slowly. Linux 5.10 is a longterm release;
kernel.org currently shows support until December 2026. The Debian/testing
installation manual still shows i386 support for their ~2023 release.

With the Travelmate, I just ran the source for K310 supplied in
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2020-10/msg00344.html
on Debian/stable's 2.22 i386 version, and the PDF output is visually
indistinguishable from that produced by 2.23.10 on current hardware.
Here's the log:

09:47:37 /tmp$ lily -d K-310 # -d selects the Debian-installed version of LP
/usr/bin/lilypond -dno-point-and-click K-310.ly
GNU LilyPond 2.22.0
Processing `K-310.ly'
Parsing...
Interpreting 
music...[8][16][24][32][40][48][56][64][72][80][88][96][104][112][120][128]
Preprocessing graphical objects...
Interpreting music...[8][16][24][32][40][48][56][64][72][80][88]
Preprocessing graphical objects...
Interpreting music...
warning: type check for `beatStructure' failed; value `1' must be of type `list'
[8][16][24][32][40][48][56][64][72][80][88][96][104][112][120][128][136][144][152][160][168][176][184][192][200][208][216][224][232][240][248]
Preprocessing graphical objects...
Finding the ideal number of pages...
Fitting music on 19 or 20 pages...
Drawing systems...
Converting to `K-310.pdf'...
Success: compilation successfully completed
09:48:31 /tmp$ 

No problem for a 1.5GHz 32-bit processor with 512MB memory.
BTW the term "plain x86" is almost meaningless. For a start,
are you talking about the processor, or the architecture?
Debian's "amd64" architecture is still an x86, just 64-bit.

> Because Apple has
> far tighter integration between computer and OS, they can more easily
> upgrade in lock-step.

Cheers,
David.