how to contribute (was: build deb of 1.7.20)

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, 07 Jun 2003 01:48:35 -0700
Paul Scott <address@hidden> wrote:
> Graham Percival wrote:
> > (the -z3 makes cvs use compression
> >while downloading any updates, which makes it faster and lessens the
> >load on the servers)
> >
> I'm willing to try this but don't understand the steps yet.  I will
> read the doc's and see if I can get more out of them but I wouldn't
> mind some hints.  I believe this (learning by example) is exactly the
> conclusion reached by some about the Lily doc's.

OK.  Delete the tarball source.  Go to
http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=lilypond
and read the "Anonymous CVS access" and "Software repository" sections.
The <modulename> you want is lilypond.

Once you've downloaded that, go into the lilypond directory and do
"cvs -z3 update".  (in case somebody submitted a change while you
were downloading the whole thing)
You must run ./autogen.sh before you compile anything.

Poke around in the source; documentation is in Documentation/ and
examples are in input/.  Find a simple mistake to correct -- if English
is your first language, try editing one section of the reference manual
(refman.tely) to correct some grammar or the like.  If that doesn't
interest you, then could add a little note to one of the refman or
tutorial pages.

For example, another person is going to add a paragraph or two about
moving text around with #'padding to the Text Markup section.  If you
don't have any ideas, I could give you a specific example.

Once you've made your changes, do a "make web-doc" and check the
results. Make sure it looks right, it doesn't break anything else, etc. 
I very much doubt that minor changes to the docs could break anything,
but you never know. And it's good to get into that habit.
(my very first CVS commit resulted in breaking "make all", and I didn't
notice. Extremely embarrassing.  :)

Once it's all working, go to the top of the source and try this:
cvs -z3 diff -u > ~/lilypond-patch

If that looks good (or at least plausible), then send it to
lilypond-devel.  Or if you want, you could send it to me first if
you want to make sure it's good before sending it out in public.  :)

> >Not as far as I know.  I always do "nice make deb", so that I can
> >still use my machine while it's building.
> >
> I still use my machine when building even without the 'nice'.

Yes, but unless you have an SMP machine, doesn't it sometimes get a bit
slow?

> I'm used to make knowing what it's already done by using timestamps. 
> I realize that it might be difficult for the creator of the make files
> to do that for something this complex and still know that all the 
> components are correct.

In some (most?) cases, you probably _can_ just do "make" and have it
pick up the pieces from where it left off.  But in some cases, it
doesn't work -- I'm currently editing and renaming some files in
input/test; if I try to "make web" after I've moved files around, it
complains that it can't find the old files (because a makefile or
something was created that has a list of all files it's supposed to
build).  If I was smart and/or not so lazy, I'd just find that one file
and delete/remake it.  But the pause gives me an excuse to get a snack,
or check email, or do whatever.

On my system, "make deb" takes hours, but "make" is only minutes and
"make web-doc" (once it's made the fonts) is something like a dozen
minutes.  When you're doing devel stuff, I recommend that you use
make/make web-doc rather than make deb.

Cheers,
- Graham