Re: Lilypond in Mac OS X Terminal

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 08:47:27PM +0100, Hans Aberg wrote:
> 
> On 12 Dec 2012, at 16:32, David Kastrup wrote:
> > Stupid question: why would one create executable shims to something like
> > DIR/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/* in ~/bin and then add ~/bin to
> > one's PATH when one can just add
> > DIR/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/ instead?  Is DIR expected to
> > contain stuff that is bad for PATH?
> 
> This directory contains other stuff that might be conflicting with other same 
> named executable. For example, ps2pdf and such comes with the TeXLive 
> installation.

Yes, that's precisely the case.  Back in the 10.4 days, prepending
that directory to the path resulted in other programs (such as
pdflatex) being unable to produce valid pdf files due to some
conflict or missing share directory.  The executable shims ensure
that lilypond uses the packaged ps2pdf, while other command-line
osx programs don't use that.  This particular problem might be
avoidable by appending that dir to the path rather than
prepending, but then I'd be concerned about lilypond using the
system ps2pdf rather than our packaged one.

The executable shims avoid those problems, while being relatively
easy to explain to newbies.

- Graham