lilypond on dos-based windows

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

I've investigated the problem: the -mwindows switch leads to broken
behaviour on dos-based windows

  1. system () commands must not be longer than 127 bytes (too short
     for the gs command,
  2. environment variables set with putenv () (or setenv from guile)
     do not appear in subsequent system () calls.

There are two ways to work around this.  The easiest is to ship two
lilypond executables, one linked with -mwindows, and one without.

On dos-based windows, we'd only use the lilypond-console.exe.  This
solution introduces the flashing dos-box again, but at least it should
work.  To get useful error output in FOO.log when running from the
gui, we'll also need to introduce a -dgui switch.

If we want to avoid the two executables and the flashing dos box, we
could maybe work around problems 1. and 2. above

  a. produce a gs.bat file (also flashes dos box) again, that sets
     GS_LIB and GS_FONTPATH
  b. use the absolute file name of gs.bat (PATH is not set)
  c. work around the command line and environment restrictions for gs
     (for a. we need environment space, we also need a > 127 chars command)
       (set cmd "command.com /E:4096 /U:250 \"(effective-prefix)/gs.bat\""
     and hope that works.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org