Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
First, I changed the lilypond shortcut on the desktop to run:
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM /C "D:\LilyPond\usr\bin\lilypond.exe" >
c:\lilyout.txt
And, when I double-click, lilypad does start up. Progress at last! :)
Does everyone have write permission in the root? Also, do you need to
specify the command intepreter? I don't think these two things will
work on newer windozes.
Yes, for this hack, you need to specify the command interpreter, at
least on WinME which is the only one I've tested, because explorer
doesn't interpret the redirection of stdout - I think it just passes it
as another command-line paramter.
As far as if everyone has write permission in c:\ - good question. By
default, I believe the answer is "yes". Microsoft has done some things
in each new version of Windows to make it more difficult to "mess up"
C:\Windows, but I don't recall ever running into permission problems on
C:\, even on business versions of Windows. But, I admit I don't have
much experience with either XP-home or XP-pro, so that might be
different. On the NT-based versions of Windows, an administrator
conceivably could set read-only permission on C:\. I haven't tried, but
maybe changing it to
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM /C "D:\LilyPond\usr\bin\lilypond.exe" >
%TMP%\lilyout.txt
would address that concern - the tmp dir should definitely be writable
by everyone!
But, another possibility is to have your installer detect the version of
windows, and install shortcuts and explorer right-click commands
specific to that version. You're already doing it for the unicode vs.
ascii version of lilypad.exe. Obviously it complicates the installer
somewhat, but complication is pretty much the life of a s/w engineer! :)
But, even better would be some type of front-end that works on all
versions of Windows, and I will try to get something coded up one of
these days so maybe it can be relatively elegant.
And, when I double-click on an .ly file, it actually creates the PDF
file! Yeah! However, command.com thinks the world should be DOS-ey,
so it munges the ly-file pathname to 8.3, meaning that what should be
example-1.pdf actually comes out as EXAMPL~1.pdf.
Ugh.
I'd prefer to re-direct to a file in %TMP% or %TEMP% (which is the
Windows standard?), and then remove it once lilypond.exe is all
finished to be nice and tidy. And of course, using real WIN32 long
filenames would be good.
Yes, until it works and is tested on Windows XP too, we should not
integrate it. Also: do you still get an error log in foo.log if you do
lilypond foo.ly > lilyout.txt
When I do that, lilypad.exe pops up displaying foo.log with the
following error message:
# -*-compilation-*-
warning: can't find file: `foo.ly'
The lilyout.txt file is empty.
It seems that we encounter *a lot* of bugs/incompatibilities in the
DOS-based Windows versions. It starts to be a major time sink, and
I'm beginning to wonder if we should support them at all. The most
problematic thing is the lack of unicode support, it is really
embarassing that we can only support ascii (the English language).
What would people say if we suggested LilyPond users to upgrade from
DOS based Windows systems to something more modern, like Windows XP or
Ubuntu linux, or send tested patches to CVS?
I have mixed emotions about the wisdom of abandoning the old,
problematic versions of windows. On the one hand, WinME is now 5-6
years old, so the user base should be dwindling, and I would agree that
it might be so much wasted effort if there aren't that many users who
would be affected. On the other hand, when Win-XP came out, there was a
LOT of dissatisfaction about locking the license to a particular
computer, thus making it a hassle to upgrade hardware or re-install.
I've heard there's a thriving market for used Win-98, I presume because
of this, so maybe the user base hasn't dwindled quite so much. Hmm...
You also mention that the most problematic thing is the lack of Unicode,
and it being embarrasing to only support ascii (English). Is there any
support, either now or planned, for lilypond itself to support Unicode?
I had the impression that since the .ly file format is specifically
specified to be ASCII, that it was probably only lilypad.exe that had
ASCII vs. Unicode issues.
Regardless, I don't think it's as problematic as you say, nor do I think
you should be embarrassed at all. You DO support Unicode (lilypad.exe),
and any user who needs Unicode is running a platform where your
installer will choose to install the Unicode version, so they won't be
affected. English-only users who have non-Unicode platforms won't
likely notice their limitation. And, even without Unicode, you probably
do actually have support for the ISO 8859-1 character set (8-bit
character superset of ASCII), so that covers Eastern Europe, if memory
serves correctly.
As far as forcing the issue back on the users by requiring tested
patches, you realize that practically speaking it means abandoning those
platforms. I don't know what your user population is, but as this is a
program of interest primarily to musicians, it's unlikely that a large
percentage would have the necessary knowledge to even get the whole
thing to compile, let alone fix bugs. And of the ones who do, many
won't feel like they have the time or inclination. So, they'll either
choose to upgrade to XP or go look for another program. I'm not sure
what I'd personally do, given my loathing of Microsoft, so maybe that's
why I'm willing to help out a certain extent.
I guess I'd say that if you'd like my advice, I think you're close
enough to getting it working on WinME that it's probably worth a little
more effort. Once it works, it probably won't be nearly so time
consuming keeping it going. I'm willing to help out some - even though
I've figured out some workarounds for my own personal use, I think this
is an excellent program that deserves as wide a user base as possible.
Do you have a way to count the number of times each installer has been
downloaded? You could pretend that there are two windows versions - one
for Win9X/ME, and one for the other, better, versions - and then see how
many people actually download the Win9X/ME version. Might give you an
idea if I'm the only squeaky wheel WinME user out there!
-Russ
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