Re: frescobaldi on mac

[Tim McNamara]

On Aug 16, 2013, at 3:22 AM, Christian Andersson <address@hidden> wrote:

> This issue with running Frescobaldi on MacOS X must be one of the most 
> long-running among threads of this list. Why can't some of you Mac users 
> please take your responsibility for the community, and see to that a working 
> distribution gets created, from which everybody (with Macs) can benefit, with 
> all the tweaks and dependencies, and then donate this for download from the 
> official Frescobaldi-site. I'd love to be able to recommend a number of 
> friends of mine, sadly (for them) with Apple boxes, to take a look at 
> Frescobaldi, but given the state of affairs here this is simply not possible 
> at the moment. Of course it is easier to do this in, e.g., a Linux platform, 
> but I just can't imagine that it would be that impossible for Macs as is 
> suggested by all these howtos, neither of which seems to work for everybody.

One problem is that most Mac users, like myself, don't have those skills.  For 
the most part it is not something we have to know when installing apps.  The 
Mac application design philosophy is much different than Linux when it comes to 
dependencies and the like.  We never have to install dependencies to install a 
Mac app, for example.  If there is something needed by the app that is not 
already part of the operating system, the developer includes it in the app 
package and the app is delivered precompiled.  Drop it somewhere on your hard 
drive, double click it, and it works.  That is what Mac users are used to.  We 
don't troubleshoot installs.  If an app doesn't work, word gets around and we 
use an alternative app.

And, like many people, I just don't have time to learn those things.  I have a 
full time-plus career that has nothing to do with computers, plus a marriage, 
plus aging parents in ill health, plus a band, plus other hobbies and 
interests, a house and yard to take care of, etc.  For better and for worse, 
like most Mac users I am reliant on developers.  My one computer class was in 
1978 and involved punch cards and Fortran IV; all I remember from that is that 
my comprehension of program design sucked and I barely passed the class.

The issue with Frescobaldi is simply that the developer is not a Mac developer, 
he is obviously a very talented and dedicated Linux developer.  And even though 
the Mac OS is based on Unix (mostly OpenBSD using the Mach kernel) and 
technically POSIX compliant, Apple has not made it particularly easy to just 
run Linux apps on the Mac.  Especially when that app is written in Python (the 
majority of Mac apps are written in Objective-C, which is more or less the 
"native" programming language for the Apple Mac SDK).

The sticking point for my attempts to install Frescobaldi is its dependence on 
Poppler to see the PDF output.  There is a bit of software necessary that also 
has to be installed, the Python-Poppler-Qt library; for me this seems to be 
broken by something.

The best hopes are for someone to make an .app package or to use the MacPorts 
repository to set up installation of all the necessary bits and bobs.  I don't 
have the know-how, but I would be happy to toss in some cash for someone who 
does have the skills to make either of those happen.  That's the best I can do.

In the meantime I continue to use Marc's LilyEditor which does what I need and 
is the best current Mac option for editing Lilypond files.