Re: LilyPond in Debian

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm investigating Debian again, looking for a new system for me. So far
> I've done a pretty minimal installation of Debian Buster (current
> "Testing"), looked for LilyPond and Guile - and was somewhat surprised.
>
> Last time I looked I found that the "lilypond" package had been removed
> from Debian Stretch (which has become the current stable release in the
> meantime), along with the removal of Guile 1.8.
>
> So I was surprised to see that a lilypond package is again available for
> Buster, albeit only 2.18.2. Further investigation turned out that
> obviously LilyPond has been reintroduced with Buster, and is also
> available in Stretch as a backport (see
> https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=lilypond&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all)
>
> Guile 1.8 on the other hand is not available in Stretch nor Buster - but
> in Sid (unstable branch), with the label "debports".
>
> If I'm not mistaken Debian only provides packages that are compiled by
> them, so LilyPond can only be included when Guile 1.8 is also present.
> So I'm actually wondering how the "lilypond" package could get into
> Stretch and Buster.
>
> Could someone with more knowledge update me on this?

It has its own prepackaged Guile-1.8 shared libraries in a private
directory.  Its executable has been replaced by a shell script that adds
this directory to the loadpath and then calls the real executable.

Hats off, I guess.  Probably not a perfect fit as a development
platform, but at least good for running.

-- 
David Kastrup