Re: macOS 64-bit

[Marnen Laibow-Koser]

Hi everyone!  In working on 64-bit Mac builds of lilypond, I notice, to my
surprise, that lilypond and lilypond-devel exist in MacPorts for 2.18.2 and
2.19.83 respectively.  I'm experimenting with these builds (as well as
other approaches), but does anyone know anything about them?  Any pitfalls
I should be aware of?

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 6:06 PM Jahrme Risner <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]

> > I think this is poor advice. IMHO MacPorts is very hard to work with (as
> an
> > end user) compared to Homebrew, and I haven't seen anyone using MacPorts
> on
> > their Mac in well over a decade. It seems to pop up mostly in developer
> > communities like this one (and that of Inkscape), but it's not popular in
> > the wider Mac community.
>
> I would be interested to hear (specifically) what about MacPorts makes it
> hard to work with compared to Homebrew. Having used Homebrew for several
> years
> but recently working with MacPorts (in part because of LilyPond) I have not
> found MacPorts to be "more difficult" than Homebrew other than perhaps the
> installation. This is not to be dismissive of any difficulties you have
> encountered, I simply want to understand better.
>
[...]

I've been experimenting with LilyPond builds over the past few days, and
doing a good deal of research about Homebrew and MacPorts, so I feel like I
can answer this question at least a little better now.  Besides the fact
that I like its UI less than that of Homebrew, I like its philosophy less.
AFAIK, Homebrew tries to work with the system libraries on macOS as much as
possible, whereas MacPorts tries to ignore them and build its own tree as
much as possible.  This has the effect that Homebrew feels to me like it
belongs on my system and plays nicely with it, whereas MacPorts feels like
an ill-behaved guest that wants to take over the world (and that's probably
the source of my other remarks about duplicated crap, as it takes a lot of
time and disk space to install things that already more or less exist in
macOS).

That said, I do understand that there are certain aspects of MacPorts'
behavior that make it advantageous on a build box, so I've been
experimenting with both MacPorts and Homebrew on the Travis environments
that I've been using to test Mac builds of LilyPond.  But my latest
research on MacPorts, and reminding myself how it works, has reinforced the
idea that on most end-users' machines, it's a bad idea and Homebrew is the
better choise.  (I might try to set up a local build VM with MacPorts to
keep it from taking over the rest of my machine, but the easiest
option—Docker—doesn't support Mac guests, and I haven't done the research
about other VM solutions yet.)

 [...]

> Second, one of the consistent issues which Travis CI would not be able to
> solve is the dependence on LaTeX (texlive). There is not, AFAIK, *any*
> elegant
> solution to the usage of texlive on macOS. Homebrew, which is the package
> manager used for macOS builds on Travis CI, has chosen to completely remove
> texlive and all[*] related packages.
>         * There may be a few packages that have found workarounds,
>           but if so they are few and far-between.
> As such, from my reading, the most common workaround to build and use
> Docker
> images inside of Travis CI to run texlive related programs which would add
> an
> extra level of complexity.
>

I can confirm that MacTeX appears to satisfy TeX dependencies.  It is
available as a Homebrew cask (in several versions, including BasicTeX) or
can be installed directly, so this shouldn't be an issue.

Best,
-- 
Marnen Laibow-Koser
address@hidden
http://www.marnen.org