Re: Which Linux distro for Lilypond

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Jan 07, 2017 at 07:53:25PM -0000, Trevor Daniels wrote:
> 
> Urs Liska wrote Saturday, January 07, 2017 6:59 PM
> 
> > Am 07.01.2017 um 19:46 schrieb H. S. Teoh:
> >> I didn't realize there was so much going on with the transition (or
> >> lack thereof?) to guile 2.0.  What of the idea of packaging the
> >> last known-to-be-good version of guile 1.8 with the lilypond
> >> sources, and just going with that?
> > 
> > Well, Guile2 seems to offer things that we will probably *want* in
> > LilyPond, e.g. support for import/export to XML.
> 
> Without knowing much about Linux distros, I'm wondering if the best
> course of action would be to aim to bundle Guile 1.8 with the LP 2.20
> release.  Would that help in keeping LP in the distros?  Would it
> sidestep the issue of their having to maintain Guile 1.8 alongside
> Guile 2?  But if they insist on recompiling from source, is it even
> possible to "bundle" Guile 1.8 with LP in other than our own
> distributions?
[...]

I can't speak for other distros, but at least as far as Debian is
concerned, if the upstream (i.e., lilypond) source tarball contains a
copy of the guile-1.8 sources, and the build script is tweaked such that
it installs a copy of guile 1.8 in paths private to lilypond, e.g.,
/usr/lib/lilypond/guile-1.8 or some such path, rather than in
system-global paths like /usr/bin/guile, then it could probably be made
to work.

Such a practice might be frowned on by Debian devs, but at least this
way lilypond would have a chance to remain in the Debian-related
distros, which I consider to be pretty important. Otherwise, we risk
losing a significant chunk of our userbase.  Not everyone is willing (or
know how) to compile lilypond from the sources just to get it to run on
a guile2 system.

Of course, the best scenario is that we figure out how to fix the
current guile2-related issues before LP 2.20 is released... but that
might need a lot more time. And we might want to keep LP 2.18 in the
distros in the meantime, which would mean bundling guile1.8 with LP
2.18.


T

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