Re: Lilypond in Mac OS X Terminal

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 08:47:27PM +0100, Hans Aberg wrote:
>> 
>> On 12 Dec 2012, at 16:32, David Kastrup wrote:
>> > Stupid question: why would one create executable shims to something like
>> > DIR/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/* in ~/bin and then add ~/bin to
>> > one's PATH when one can just add
>> > DIR/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/ instead?  Is DIR expected to
>> > contain stuff that is bad for PATH?
>> 
>> This directory contains other stuff that might be conflicting with
>> other same named executable. For example, ps2pdf and such comes with
>> the TeXLive installation.
>
> Yes, that's precisely the case.  Back in the 10.4 days, prepending
> that directory to the path resulted in other programs (such as
> pdflatex) being unable to produce valid pdf files due to some conflict
> or missing share directory.  The executable shims ensure that lilypond
> uses the packaged ps2pdf, while other command-line osx programs don't
> use that.

Then we should put those executables provided just for the sake of our
own programs internally into a separate directory rather than bin.
I have seen libexec being used for that.

> This particular problem might be avoidable by appending that dir to
> the path rather than prepending, but then I'd be concerned about
> lilypond using the system ps2pdf rather than our packaged one.
>
> The executable shims avoid those problems, while being relatively easy
> to explain to newbies.

The libexec route appears to cater for all of that.  We should use bin
just for executables supposed to be entry points of LilyPond.

-- 
David Kastrup