On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 08:53:22PM +0000, Dave Addey wrote: > 1) How do you rate my chances of getting Lilypond to compile for the > ARM-based iPhone OS, especially given the number of libraries it depends > on?
Compiling on an ARM-based chip? No problem. Debian's been compiling lilypond on arm for years. On the iphone OS? Almost zero. You'd certainly need to jailbreak your phone, but even then I'm pessimistic about porting all the font-related libraries to whateve environment you get with a jailbroken iphone OS. That said, I've heard that iphoneOS is a variant of OSX, and people manage to compile it on OSX (after a lot of trouble), so maybe I'm overly pessimistic here. > 2) Would there be any licensing issues in using Lilypond (and dependent > libraries) in a paid app on a closed platform such as the iPhone? Yes. LilyPond is GPL. If it's compiled directly into your app, you'd need to distribute source for lilypond and your app. GPL software on the iphone is a grey area in general. Some people interpret the GPL as requiring that the user be able to compile your software (which is not possible unless the user has an iphone developer license, costing $99). Other people say that as long as the source is available, it's fine. Note that the iphone has no provision for distributing app sources, so you'd need to add a special button to your app which extracts the source (which you distrbuted as part of your app) and saves it in a location for the user. If you run lilypond as a service (which AFAIK isn't possible in the non-multitasking iphone OS), then you'd be fine. > 3) What's the likely performance of rendering .ly files on a lower-powered > (and lower-memory) device such as an iPhone or iPod Touch? Is it likely to > take seconds, minutes or hours? 4 bars? I'd say a few seconds. A page of music with no tweaks? Maybe a minute. > 4) If performance is likely to be a no-go, what are my best alternative? > Server-side PDF generation for delivery to a device? Server-side PDF generation would work, although we recently switched to GPLv3 so you'd need to double-check how that works for web apps. You'll want to look into security, since lilypond doesn't do any such checking. Do a few mailist searches; the question pops up from time to time and I don't feel like repeating myself for an 8th time. > Any thoughts or ideas much appreciated. I've a fair bit of experience in > Mac open-source development (I wrote much of the audio code for > Handbrake), but I'm new to Lilypond, so would be starting from scratch in > compiling it. Trying to guess at your intentions, you'd probably be better off different software. I vaguely recall some kind of KDE applet that did music notation... muscore or something like that? In any case, I really doubt that lilypond is the right tool for this job. BTW, thanks for your work on Handbrake! It was very handy when I moved from my parent's house to different city for university in Canada. :) Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
