Re: building lilypond.exe to test WinME fixes

[Brynne and Russ Jorgensen]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Brynne and Russ Jorgensen writes:
>
>
> > I did some experimenting with some simple tst.c programs in regards to
> > the problem with lilypond.exe not working under WinME unless stdout
> > has been redirected to a file.
>
>
> Great.  Btw, did you see Basil's mail about setting CYGWIN=tty?  Sure,
> this only affects when running from the Cygwin promp, but it is
> something?

No, didn't see it.  I don't know enough about what CYGWIN=tty does to 
have much idea if it helps debug the problem...

> Does lilypond not run at all, is this the latest version only?  Why
> didn't we catch this before?  Sacha reports that lilypond works, but
> gs does not generate PDFs on Windows ME...

This has been happening since 2.5.27 - that's the main problem I've been 
trying to overcome.  I don't think the problem is with gs not generating 
a PDF, but rather with lilypond not being able to execute gs - it pops 
up a dos-box with an error message something like "no such program or 
command".  Redirecting lilypond stdout to a file seems to "fix" the 
problem, but it's kind of kludgy.  As I mentioned before, redirecting 
lilypond stdout to nul doesn't work, but I think I now know why.  It 
turns out that under WinME command prompt, if it thinks you're executing 
a GUI app, then even if you run
        application.xyz > nul
it doesn't actually open a handle to the nul device, but instead just 
leaves stdout set to an invalid handle.  So, what I was thinking of 
doing is something like this in lilypond main():

if (GetStdHandle (STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE) == INVALID_HANDLE) {
        /* send stdout to nul device */
        freopen ("nul$", "w", stdout);
}

This shouldn't cause problems on other versions of Windows, but if we 
wanted to be super conservative we could conditionalize it for just 
Win9x/ME.

I'm trying to get set up to compile lilypond so I can experiment with 
possible fixes.  I got it far enough I can probably start testing (it's 
tracing fonts right now, and I have to reboot after every couple of 
fonts - looks like some resource is leaking cause it eventually bombs 
out trying to create a pipe to gf2pbm...).  Anyway, I copied the 
lilypond.exe I just created over to my lilypond/usr/bin directory, but 
it's not acting at all like the binary I downloaded from lilypond.org. 
My guess is that ./configure didn't quite get everything set up right, 
because 1) it acts more like a console app, 2) it outputs the Lilypond 
version to the screen, and 3) then it bombs out can't find lily.scm. 
I'm using cygwin as my development platform.  Do you have suggestions 
about how you get it correctly configured under cygwin development 
environment?  I don't think it even linked with -mwindows, so at the 
least I need to do some tweaking.  Any suggestions would be welcome.

        -Russ