Re: lilypond-devel Digest, Vol 90, Issue 84

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Kieren MacMillan
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> I'm happy to continue with the VM install I've started... but Graham (the 
> expert, AFAICT) is recommending that I wait.

To elaborate:

Given your background, attitude, and daily use of lilypond for your
composition job, you're an ideal lilypond developer.  I fully expect
that once you start development, within a year you'll be one of the
top 10 developers [of that year], and within two years you could very
well be one of the top 5 developers.

If you start following the CG instructions for compiling within a
virtual machine, I estimate that there's an 80% chance you'll succeed.
 Is that good enough?  Well, I'm quite (small-c) conservative and
risk-adverse.  Based on my estimate, that gives a 20% chance of losing
a developer like I expect you to become.  I'm not willing to take that
gamble.

If this was your first or second time, I'd recommend that you start
with the VM wholeheartedly.  But you've been screwed around too many
times by inaccurate and contradictory advice from the developer
community, so I don't want to risk this happening a third time.


That said, I'd forgotten that James has (I believe) the same setup as
you.  If you really *do* have the same setup (both osx-intel, and with
the same version of OSX installed) -- and if you wait for his advice
instead of following well-intentioned but possibly-misleading advice
from other people -- then I'd bump the chance of success up to 95%.

Is that good enough?  Well, I wouldn't jump on those odds
wholeheartedly.  My feeling would still be to wait until I'd
personally set up a VM, checked out the CG instructions, built it a
few times by doing cut&paste jobs from the CG, etc.  But then again, a
5% chance of failure isn't too bad... in D&D terms, that's a 1 on a
d20.

*shrug*

In the end, it's really up to you.  I'm certain that James would be
willing to help you with this task.  He's recently (6 months ago) gone
through the same steps that you'll be doing, he's good at explaining
things, and he's very willing to add or modify the CG if/when you
discover problems in the CG.  The only real snag I'd ancitipate would
be if you had a version of OSX that the virtualization software didn't
support -- once the VM is working and lilybuntu has booted, it should
go smoothly after that**.

** that said, I'm hoping to have a new version of lilybuntu in a month
or two.  There's currently only one known problem with it (it's only
an annoyance for patch-making; has no effect on building):

http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1051


Cheers,
- Graham