Re: Running under Snow Leopard

[Patrick McCarty]

On 2009-10-28, Peter Leschev wrote:
> 
> I noticed a few mails saying that lilypond does not run
> using Snow Leopard. On a fresh machine, I installed 2.13.6
> and experienced the endless loop while constructing the
> font list. I removed this version & installed 2.12.2 and
> it ran successfully

Thanks for your report.

At this point, we can only speculate about the reasons why 2.12.2
works but 2.13.6 does not, because 2.12.2 was built with GUB2 (no
longer exists) and 2.13.6 was built with GUB3.

Many changes were made between GUB2 and GUB3, including dependency
updates, etc. etc.  It would be extremely difficult to track down the
problem this way.  And the problem might not be with GUB after all.


Here are some items I've noted while trying to debug this:

1) The "endless" loop occurs during the font caching stage while
processing the LastResort.ttf font.

2) On OSX 10.5 (Leopard), the LastResort.ttf font does not exist.
There is a LastResort.dfont instead.

3) I don't know if it makes a difference, but here are the size
differences between LastResort.{dfont,ttf}

  LastResort.dfont =  2.5MB
  LastResort.ttf   = 14.0MB

4) There was a recent change in Fontforge that involved the LastResort
font.  This might have been a related problem.  See
  
  http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/changelog.html

5) I took many "samples" with the Activity Monitor to see if that
would provide any leads, with no luck.  Everything branched from
FcConfigBuildFonts(), as I initially suspected (see font-config.cc).

***

There are three applications that would be helpful in debugging
further, but I don't have the privileges to install/use these
programs:

1) dtrace
2) Instruments (part of Xcode)
3) gdb

If you or anyone else running Snow Leopard can report any more
observations with help from these tools, or other debugging tools,
that would be wonderful.


Thanks,
Patrick