Re: compiling

[Marijn Schouten (hkBst)]

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Graham Percival wrote:
> Joe Neeman wrote:
>> I'm not sure how many of these are still a problem, but the main
>> problem I've had in the past is that lilypond depends on versions of
>> other programs that aren't always in a distribution's repositories.
>>   
> Yeah.  For example, Debian _still_ doesn't have guile-1.8.2 or higher. 
> Not even in the unstable branch!  I think this was released about a year
> ago.  :(

Actually
1.8.0 was released 2006-02-12
1.8.1 was released 2006-10-06
1.8.2 was released 2007-07-16
as you can find on <http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news.html>

> If I were to try compiling lilypond, I'd have to compile/install guile
> myself (either apply the rational bugfix to 1.8.1, or do .2).

I'm sure Debian will apply the rational patch to their 1.8.1 package if you
ask for it or bump to 1.8.2 and if not there is always Gentoo :P.

>> On my current machine, I installed guile, ghostscript and mftrace
>> manually before I could build lilypond (and guile also needed to be
>> patched). Ok, so "involved" might be an exaggeration, but lilypond is
>> a little fussy about its build environment.
>>   
> With good reason, I think -- once we find a bug in the underlying
> libraries, it doesn't make sense to try to work around that bug in our
> own code.  But that does mean that we have to wait a year (or more)
> before those underlying projects release new versions and get packaged
> for major distributions.

Are there really distributions that don't apply patches for bugfixes to their
packages (especially if they are already accepted upstream)? If it takes more
than a year it is probably a sign that certain packages aren't maintained
(much) due to staffing needs going unfulfilled.

Marijn

- --
Marijn Schouten (hkBst), Gentoo Lisp project
<http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode
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