tetex 2.5 and lilypond 2.0

[Laura Conrad]

I sympathize with all the users who are just now running into the
difficulties of keeping lilypond files in sync with lilypond
development.  I've been using lilypond since about 1.4, and it hasn't
gotten any easier.

I also agree with the people who've been saying that the right answer
is to keep old lilypond versions installed, so that you can update a
lilypond file in a minor way without going through the conversion and
re-tweaking process every time.

My problem is that I have several major projects that are in lilypond
2.0.  Even where convert-ly performs flawlessly (which it doesn't for
a number of features, like multi-verse vocal music), it would be at
least hours and more likely days of work to do all the re-tweaking and
repaginating to convert these books to lily 2.8.

You can't just install lily 2.0 on a modern (less than a year old)
linux system, because the fix for having lilypond use tetex 3.0
happened sometime in the 2.4 development cycle, and was never
backported to older versions.

Until last week, I was dealing with this on my Debian Unstable system
by pinning tetex to 2.5.  Unfortunately, last week my machine died,
and I decided to put Ubuntu Dapper on the new machine.  

It turns out not to be possible to install tetex 2.5 directly on an Ubuntu
Dapper machine.  A very nice person on the ubuntu users list is
attempting to walk me through building the tetex 2.5 from Ubuntu
Breezy for Ubuntu Dapper, but it doesn't seem to be easy, and in any
case, as a publisher I use TeX for enough things that sooner or later
I'm sure I will want something that needs tetex 3.0.

So I'm considering the following options:

   Installing Ubuntu breezy or some other distribution with tetex 2.5
   on it in another partition on my giant new hard drive.  I only need
   to change the 2.0 lily files a few times a year, so this might be
   the most straightforward thing for me to do.

   Seeing if I can run lilypond 2.0 from a TeX Live CD of the
   appropriate vintage.  Has anyone tried to run any lilypond with any
   TeX Live CD and what were the results?

   Finding out what were the changes necessary for lilypond to run on
   tetex 3.0 and what's involved in backporting them to lilyond 2.0.
   Can anyone help with this?  This would be the most straightforward
   answer for lilypond development in general.

I'm sure I'm not the only person facing problems like this, so I'd be
interested in hearing what other people are doing about them.

-- 
Laura (mailto:address@hidden , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097  fax: (501) 641-5011
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139