Re: state of the ’Pond for earnest tadpoles

[Thomas Morley]

Hi Kieren,

Am Sa., 2. Jan. 2021 um 00:00 Uhr schrieb Kieren MacMillan
<kieren_macmillan@sympatico.ca>:
>
> Hi Michael (et al.),
>
> > please use http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/contributor/lilydev
> > instead. I adjusted some parts of this section last year. However, I
> > would be happy to hear if something remains still unclear.
>
> This is great. Thanks.
>
> I have now compiled Lilypond on my machine! Took ~10 minutes (though I was 
> doing a lot of other processor-intensive things at the same time, didn’t 
> minimize the terminal window, etc., so I expect that can be reduced).

To compare, on my weak and slow laptop and starting from scratch (i.e.
after nuking the \build-directory)
make -j5 CPU_COUNT=5
takes ~15 minutes.

As long as you work only on .ly- or .scm-files you don't need to start
from scratch, but simply redo `make`. It will be much faster then.
Ofcourse over time patches concerning .cc-files or the build-process
will arrive, then you need to start earlier.
Speaking only for me, I usually remove the \build-directory and start
at the beginning, running autogen.sh ...

> The only suggestion I would have is to maybe mention that the initial build 
> outputs *some* documentation. When I started seeing “Making 
> Documentation/out” in the terminal output, I started to worry that I had 
> somehow triggered the documentation build which would apparently take 
> multiple hours.  =)

Iiuc, `make` initiates files like `notation.texi`, but they are not
processed, i.e. no pdf or html is generated from them.
A full `make doc` takes hours for me, even if invoked with `make doc
-j5 CPU_COUNT=5`
Thus I hardly do so, but use the CG-documented methods:

CG 4.6.2 Generating documentation
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/contributor/generating-documentation#building-documentation
Section: Building documentation
Section: Building a single document

CG 5.7.1 Scripts to test the documentation
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/contributor/scripts-to-test-the-documentation
Section: Building only one section of the documentation

I found the last possibility only recently.

If you want to only build the internals you may use the undocumented:
  lilypond generate-documentation.ly && texi2html internals.texi &&
firefox internals.html
The result is a raw, only basically formatted internals.html in the
directory where the command is run.
During compilation a plethora of warnings are omitted, I usually
ignore them, the generated file is good for proof-reading, not more
and will be superseeded by `make doc` anyway.
Biggest advantage for me: it finishes in less than 1 minute.

Cheers,
  Harm