Re: GUB newbie question

[Carl Sorensen]

On 12/26/19, 6:10 AM, "lilypond-devel on behalf of Muzhic" 
<lilypond-devel-bounces+c_sorensen=address@hidden on behalf of address@hidden> 
wrote:

    Hello folks,
    
    If a C++ compiler, flex, bison and Guile are installed on Windows or Mac OS 
X, what prevents LilyPond from being built — in other words, why is GUB needed?

GUB was created because having a user create an appropriate build system on any 
given platform was a lot of work, and the building depended strongly enough on 
individual versions of the installed software that it was difficult to give 
advice to people on how to build on their system.

For a few years I tried building lilypond on Cygwin, but then it became 
unmaintainable, so I moved to Linux.  With different versions of Linux, that 
even became difficult, so I moved to a VM and LilyDev (which has a known-good 
configuration in a particular Linux variation installed in a VM).

GUB is nice for LilyPond as a project as long as it works, because it 
automatically cross-compiles build targets for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.  Of 
course, now we have problems with GUB not working as desired because it doesn't 
have built-in Windows 64-bit support, and it can't (by licensing terms) use the 
Apple XCode libraries, so it doesn’t have built-in MacOS 64-bit support, 
either.  So it appears that the utility of GUB is slipping.

In terms of an individual user, GUB has marginal utility.  LilyDev does not use 
GUB.  If you can get all of the appropriate software installed so that "make" 
works properly in your system, you don't need GUB. 

If you care to spend the time to get a working build environment set up on 
Windows, please share the results.  We'd love to have them posted somewhere 
(maybe in the CG) to make building feasible on Windows.

Thanks,

Carl