Re: -dgui option dropped in 2.24 - how to stop the black box on Windows now?

[Aaron Hill]

On 2023-04-03 10:31 am, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> > Le 3 avr. 2023 à 12:21, Richard Shann <richard@rshann.plus.com> a 
> > écrit :
> >
> > Is there any chance the developers might re-instate the
> > lilypond-windows.exe?
>
> Maybe. Is it as easy as compiling with -mconsole ? Does that have other 
> effects to take care of? Is there a use case where the current mode is 
> important or could we just switch to the other mode?

LilyPond would still need to be able to be run purely from the terminal, 
so the main target should continue to use the console subsystem.  This 
importantly covers the scenarios of scripting and automation where you 
need standard I/O to be mapped properly.

The use case for a third-party GUI application running LilyPond 
behind-the-scenes is where the "windows" subsystem could be useful, 
providing the application is unable to spawn the child process in a 
hidden manner.

This goes to my question of which application has the real problem.  
Denemo relied on LilyPond providing two entrypoints, so it was not 
really at fault.  But Denemo probably should have been spawning the 
worker process hidden to begin with, thus never relying on 
lilypond-windows.exe in the first place.  However, that would require 
working around glib to use the Win32 API directly (and adding 
platform-specific development overhead), or by getting the glib 
developers to expose the underlying process creation flag.  But for all 
I know, it might be out-of-scope for glib to support this scenario, thus 
pushing the work back to Denemo.

It should be noted that this dual subsystem approach is very common on 
Windows.  Take the Windows scripting host itself.  It comes in two 
flavors: wscript.exe and cscript.exe.  The first is for use without an 
attached terminal, and the second is meant to be run from the 
command-line.  Java likewise has always shipped with two frontends: 
java.exe and javaw.exe.  So, LilyPond would not be doing anything 
unusual by shipping two executables.


-- Aaron Hill