Re: problems with lilypond 2.5.31 under WinME

[Brynne and Russ Jorgensen]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:


> > First, I changed the lilypond shortcut on the desktop to run:
> >
> > C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM /C "D:\LilyPond\usr\bin\lilypond.exe" >
> > c:\lilyout.txt
>
>
> > And, when I double-click, lilypad does start up.  Progress at last! :)
>
>
> Does everyone have write permission in the root?  Also, do you need to
> specify the command intepreter?  I don't think these two things will
> work on newer windozes.

Yes, for this hack, you need to specify the command interpreter, at 
least on WinME which is the only one I've tested, because explorer 
doesn't interpret the redirection of stdout - I think it just passes it 
as another command-line paramter.

As far as if everyone has write permission in c:\ - good question.  By 
default, I believe the answer is "yes".  Microsoft has done some things 
in each new version of Windows to make it more difficult to "mess up" 
C:\Windows, but I don't recall ever running into permission problems on 
C:\, even on business versions of Windows.  But, I admit I don't have 
much experience with either XP-home or XP-pro, so that might be 
different.  On the NT-based versions of Windows, an administrator 
conceivably could set read-only permission on C:\.  I haven't tried, but 
maybe changing it to

C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM /C "D:\LilyPond\usr\bin\lilypond.exe" > 
%TMP%\lilyout.txt

would address that concern - the tmp dir should definitely be writable 
by everyone!

But, another possibility is to have your installer detect the version of 
windows, and install shortcuts and explorer right-click commands 
specific to that version.  You're already doing it for the unicode vs. 
ascii version of lilypad.exe.  Obviously it complicates the installer 
somewhat, but complication is pretty much the life of a s/w engineer! :) 
 But, even better would be some type of front-end that works on all 
versions of Windows, and I will try to get something coded up one of 
these days so maybe it can be relatively elegant.

> > And, when I double-click on an .ly file, it actually creates the PDF
> > file!  Yeah!  However, command.com thinks the world should be DOS-ey,
> > so it munges the ly-file pathname to 8.3, meaning that what should be
> > example-1.pdf actually comes out as EXAMPL~1.pdf.
>
>
> Ugh.
>
>
> > I'd prefer to re-direct to a file in %TMP% or %TEMP% (which is the
> > Windows standard?), and then remove it once lilypond.exe is all
> > finished to be nice and tidy.  And of course, using real WIN32 long
> > filenames would be good.
>
>
> Yes, until it works and is tested on Windows XP too, we should not
> integrate it.  Also: do you still get an error log in foo.log if you do
>
>     lilypond foo.ly > lilyout.txt

When I do that, lilypad.exe pops up displaying foo.log with the 
following error message:

> # -*-compilation-*-
> warning: can't find file: `foo.ly'

The lilyout.txt file is empty.

> It seems that we encounter *a lot* of bugs/incompatibilities in the
> DOS-based Windows versions.  It starts to be a major time sink, and
> I'm beginning to wonder if we should support them at all.  The most
> problematic thing is the lack of unicode support, it is really
> embarassing that we can only support ascii (the English language).
>
> What would people say if we suggested LilyPond users to upgrade from
> DOS based Windows systems to something more modern, like Windows XP or
> Ubuntu linux, or send tested patches to CVS?

I have mixed emotions about the wisdom of abandoning the old, 
problematic versions of windows.  On the one hand, WinME is now 5-6 
years old, so the user base should be dwindling, and I would agree that 
it might be so much wasted effort if there aren't that many users who 
would be affected.  On the other hand, when Win-XP came out, there was a 
LOT of dissatisfaction about locking the license to a particular 
computer, thus making it a hassle to upgrade hardware or re-install. 
I've heard there's a thriving market for used Win-98, I presume because 
of this, so maybe the user base hasn't dwindled quite so much.  Hmm...

You also mention that the most problematic thing is the lack of Unicode, 
and it being embarrasing to only support ascii (English).  Is there any 
support, either now or planned, for lilypond itself to support Unicode? 
 I had the impression that since the .ly file format is specifically 
specified to be ASCII, that it was probably only lilypad.exe that had 
ASCII vs. Unicode issues.

Regardless, I don't think it's as problematic as you say, nor do I think 
you should be embarrassed at all.  You DO support Unicode (lilypad.exe), 
and any user who needs Unicode is running a platform where your 
installer will choose to install the Unicode version, so they won't be 
affected.  English-only users who have non-Unicode platforms won't 
likely notice their limitation.  And, even without Unicode, you probably 
do actually have support for the ISO 8859-1 character set (8-bit 
character superset of ASCII), so that covers Eastern Europe, if memory 
serves correctly.

As far as forcing the issue back on the users by requiring tested 
patches, you realize that practically speaking it means abandoning those 
platforms.  I don't know what your user population is, but as this is a 
program of interest primarily to musicians, it's unlikely that a large 
percentage would have the necessary knowledge to even get the whole 
thing to compile, let alone fix bugs.  And of the ones who do, many 
won't feel like they have the time or inclination.  So, they'll either 
choose to upgrade to XP or go look for another program.  I'm not sure 
what I'd personally do, given my loathing of Microsoft, so maybe that's 
why I'm willing to help out a certain extent.

I guess I'd say that if you'd like my advice, I think you're close 
enough to getting it working on WinME that it's probably worth a little 
more effort.  Once it works, it probably won't be nearly so time 
consuming keeping it going.  I'm willing to help out some - even though 
I've figured out some workarounds for my own personal use, I think this 
is an excellent program that deserves as wide a user base as possible.

Do you have a way to count the number of times each installer has been 
downloaded?  You could pretend that there are two windows versions - one 
for Win9X/ME, and one for the other, better, versions - and then see how 
many people actually download the Win9X/ME version.  Might give you an 
idea if I'm the only squeaky wheel WinME user out there!

        -Russ