Re: How to build LilyPond.app on macOS?

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Michael, Werner & others,

On 6 December 2016 at 08:54, Michael Gerdau wrote:
> Hi Mojca,
>
>> Can someone please provide me a hint about how to build LilyPond.app
>> on macOS (natively, without any cross-compiling, ideally without
>> compiling any dependencies like ghostscript etc.)?
>
> you won't like this:

I slightly feared that, but no problem :)

> It is not meant to be compiled natively.
>
> If you want to do that anyway you'd have to do the porting all for
> yourself.

Can you please point me to the sources? Which parts would have to be
ported or how extensive is the job likely to be? Do just the
configure/makefiles need adjustment or also the source code? (I'm only
interested in adding the GUI part, lilypond itself has already been
packaged, so dependencies of the command line program are not
currently an issue.)

>From a quick glimpse it looks like a Python application with some
Cocoa bindings and a bunch of "plain text" files (.info, .nib). Plus a
lot of configuration to make sure that it finds the appropriate files
and of course making sure that all the dependencies are there.
Dependencies shouldn't be so problematic (lilypond and lilypond are
already packaged and "work perfectly" aside from the slightly annoying
part that the devel version no longer compiles with clang), even
though I suspect there's something wrong with our guile libraries,
sometimes we get

ERROR: In procedure dynamic-link:
ERROR: file: "libguile-srfi-srfi-1-v-3", message: "file not found"

On 6 December 2016 at 09:45, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
>
> However, we rely heavily on the GNU stuff (in
> particular the gcc compiler), which is not native to MacOS.

In the context of a package manager this is not an issue at all.

The fact that GCC is needed is slightly annoying, but it's handled by
the package manager automatically, it just pulls in an annoying
additional dependency which is often problematic due to a different
stdlib; when C++ interfaces are shared between dependencies, that's a
problem that leads to crashes of software, but I think (or hope) that
this is not the case in LilyPond. Or at least I didn't experience any
problems so far. Other software crashes immediately when mixing
stdlibs.

> I think it would be an excellent idea to provide something for
> Homebrew – if we can make lilypond work with guile 2, I don't see
> large obstacles.

I'm not talking about HomeBrew and I have guile 1.8.8 installed with
the package manager (but maybe it wasn't configured properly), so
dependency on guile 1.8 is not an obstacle either.

Again: we already have a working package for lilypond, the only(?)
missing bit is the GUI.

Thank you,
    Mojca