Re: How to build LilyPond.app on macOS?

[Andrew Bernard]

Hello Graham,

 

> On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 07:25:44PM +0100, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> >

> > I can luckily skip that part :)

> > Including instructions to fetch Python 2.6.

> > (I really wonder why LilyPond nowadays ships with Python 2.6.)

 

> Changing it to something else would require updating all our

> scripts, cross-compiling the newer version of python on all 8 (or

> so) architectures, and testing the whole thing.  This is a

> non-trivial undertaking, especially since (ideally) the end result

> is "things work exactly the way they did before spending 100 hours

> on this task".

 

> That's why technical debt is so hard to combat: it takes a lot of

> effort, and there's usually no immediate payoff.  Sure, it would

> help things in 1, 2, 5, or 10 years down the road.

 

I’d like to change the subject line of this new thread, but just now needed to leave it in context as a reply.

 

I have offered on more than one occasion on the list to do the Python port. I have been knocked back, to be more accurate, strongly discouraged, each time. As somebody with over forty years of software development experience, I have the skills required, but not only that I have the time and the motivation, and the inclination to help. I have maintained for a long time that a Python upgrade is valuable, especially after not having a current version of Python prevented me from doing some task quite some time ago (I no longer remember which! But no matter.). I am perfectly aware that the outcome of the work is ‘nothing changes’ – but this is not the point. It provides the way forward for lilypond to keep current with Python. I currently have the time and energy to do this work. Is there anybody at all who would support this idea? Surely this has to be done at some point in time. Why not now? After all, we are attacking the guile 2 matter currently, and similar arguments have been made against doing that in the past.

 

Andrew