Re: LilyPond 1.3.148

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Jérémie Lumbroso <address@hidden> writes:

> Well you should probably not bother at all if you won't take the
> time to create a decent shell.

You may be right, there's a dilemma.  I'm putting time into something
that I won't ever need myself, and others may not really like.  But if
we *don't* have a current windows version, windows users (having
trouble compiling lilypond themselves) will also take part of my
time.

Let's put it another way.  You may not like the way the installer
installs LilyPond, but I made it the way that I like it.  And if it
*works*, I feel that I have done more than my share.  You are more
than welcome to help us make it better.  It is available for anyone to
make changes, just send a patch.

Mind you, that Windows is the only platfrom that non of the developers
use, yet we supply precompiled binaries, and an install tool for.
Debian GNU/Linux, SuSE, Mandrake, *BSD have all done this for us.

> I'm sure the people who enjoy DOS scripting, are also capable of
> porting their own Lilypond, so if you don't think the job is worth
> doing, let someone else handle it.

This is not the way we think.  I believe in helping eachother.  We
provide a basic installer, people that know how to script DOS can add
that option to it.  I don't believe in having everyone reinvent how to
install LilyPond best.
 
> if Windows users _wanted_ an UNIX-like shell, the- y would just
> install UNIX

Maybe.  I don't think that many windows users have used Bash (or even
know it exists), but then decided that they like plain DOS better.

> As Matts me- ntionned, though MiKTeX and Python are installed, and
> properly de- clared with the PATH variable, they are not found and
> this causes problem.

Ah, a technical problem, would you like to help me fix this?  (See
below.)

> Wha- t do you all make of Windows 2000, Millenium and the
> forthcomming XP generation?

That's another reason for staying with cygwin, they will make great
efforts to support new versions of windows.  If I had to make a bet, I
would say that Bash has better chances to always be available on
windows that DOS shell has (because `we' have the source, and can
always make it work).

> >     PATH=$(registry-get.exe 'MIKTEX_BIN'):$PATH
> 
> It'd be quite hard to do this for a DOS application

No, it's not:

    http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/cygwin-ug-net/using-utils.html#REGTOOL

> If the Python application is registered, for instance, you can ob-
> tain it's path (the path of the binary) with the following key:
> --> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App
> Paths\Python.exe\Default

Ok, could you send me the output of

    regtool -q get 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppPaths\Python.exe\Default

or if that fails, figure out how to run the regtool utility to get
Python's, GSView's and MiKTeX paths, so that I can fix the login
scripts?

> I think the most viable (but quite unprofessional) way to deal wi-
> th thy installer is to use the one provided by Clickteam.

It has been painful enough, that a LilyPond as a GNU project had
windows installers that are not free software.  We can't (and don't
want to) use that.  Also, does that kind of software compile on Linux,
because you don't want to do real development under windows.

> I personally think this is a must.

Ok.  Mats also asked for this, so I'll try to add these tonight.

Thanks for your comments.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org