Re: RedHat7.3 and Windows

[Mats Bengtsson]

>  >> Why is there not a zip or complete package?
>
>  Jan> No-one has made one.  Do you know how Cygwin works?  I think a
>  Jan> `complete package' would be a very bad idea.
>
> I do not want to know how cygwin works; i have used it in the past
> without any detailed knowledge.  I am not interested in cygwin, just
> music typesetting.

What Jan is trying to tell you is that a full download of Cygwin
would be far too big to download. Of course, we could make a copy
with only the Cygwin packages that are really necessary for LilyPond,
but that would probably involve at least 10-20MB (wild guess).
However, the next time you upgrade LilyPond, you only have to
update some 10% of all these megabytes, and we would have to keep
different upgrade packages for each earlier installed version.
Also, many users want some extra Cygwin packages to be able to
work more conveniently.

Of course, everything would be easier for you if we had a version
of LilyPond compiled with native Windows compilers but that would
unfortunately require a complete redesign of the full program since
we currently use many convenient facilities that are only available
in Linux and Cygwin. Also, none of the main authors use Windows
regularly.

   /Mats