Re: anyone got lilypond 2.16.2 to work on Windows Vista?

[David Kastrup]

Robert Honore <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 18:03:57 -0700 David Rogers wrote:
>
>> Robert: It seems to me that you are working very hard to outsmart
>> Lilypond, doing tricks that "should theoretically work if..." some
>> particular obscure unreliable condition is met.
>
> David Rogers, let me assure you that I most certainly _DO NOT_ intend
> to "outsmart Lilypond" or attempt "doing tricks" of any sort, whether
> theoretical or otherwise.

We are getting into unpleasant territory here.  Please let us recognize
that everybody here is trying his best to be helpful and not vent our
frustration when the assumptions people make about each other are
inaccurate.

It should be obvious by now that your problem is not a frequent one, so
it is important to figure out where your installation happens to differ.
I am not using Windows myself, so my input is likely of marginal
relevance, but I'll give it a try nevertheless.

If the instructions for installing LilyPond from scratch fail in your
case but succeed for others, and if we assume that you followed the
instructions reasonably well (and they are not all that long, I think),
then there are two possibilities:

a) your system differs in its "from scratch" state from that of others
b) you have not managed to uninstall previous LilyPond installations
   such that "from scratch" is reached for the purpose of LilyPond
c) your choices for things you were purportedly free to choose were
   unlucky

Let's start with the last: installation paths containing strange
characters like spaces (though those are probably frequent enough
nowadays that others would have seen the problem already) or
non-alphanumeric characters, or too many dots, or path components like
"nul" or "con" or similar (a path component being everything between
backslashes: Windows has some very strange peculiarities).

Then earlier versions of LilyPond entered themselves to the PATH system
variable but likely did not remove themselves again.  Newer versions
don't touch the PATH variable at all: the installation instructions tell
you how to do it manually.

So check that no old remnants are in the PATH variable, and that the new
LilyPond's binary directory can be found in there, and that no
inaccessible network drives or similar stuff that would be good for long
delays is before LilyPond.

Now you have already stated that LilyPond runs but hangs when trying to
generate a font database.  That would again warrant checking that the
font database and the tools generating it are not on some inaccessible
network drive.  The same holds for the setting of TEMPDIR (or TMPDIR
maybe?) which some utilities use in order to know where they place files
only used temporarily.  If that drive does not exist, bad things may
happen.

Then it may be important that configured directories contain the drive
letter and start with a backslash (are absolute) or the directories will
no longer be found when the drive letter or current directory is being
changed.

That's what I currently can think of regarding possibly bad surprises
with Windows systems.  I have no idea whether one of them will apply
here, but checking for them should not do much harm.

-- 
David Kastrup