Re: Building Lilypond for different platforms

[John Mandereau]

Mark wrote:
> I've a couple a questions for builds for windows and macs. If anyone could 
> help
> I would be very grateful.
> 1) Am I correct in thinking that you can build binaries for Windows and Macs 
> in
> Linux by altering the config scripts?

Of course, this is exactly how released binaries are built: binaries are
cross-compiled on a GNU/Linux system for all platforms (although it's a
bit more problematic for MacOS 10.5).  However, it's a bit more complex
than simply altering config scripts.


> 2) if this is correct any pointers on how to do it :) 

The framework is called GUB (Grand Unified Binaries), you can fetch it
through the Git repository
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=lilypond.git
If you don't want to learn using Git now (but I'd recommend to learn it
if you want to track LilyPond and GUB development), you can download a
snapshot at
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=lilypond.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/gub


GUB is documented in three README* files at top of its source tree.
You can learn about Git in the two first chapter of the User manual
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html
and we also have ready-to-use Git instructions for lilypond.org
translators
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=lilypond.git;a=blob_plain;f=README;hb=web
(simply replace "web" with "gub" in Git commands).


> I am now going to go and install linux and do the builds there.

This is not a bad idea, since it's known to be possible to build
binaries for Windows with GUB.  As an alternative (and probably
untested) way, you could try to set up GUB to compile Windows binaries
on Windows, by running GUB either on MinGW or on Cygwin.

Please let us know about the results of your building experiments.

Good luck (again)
John