Porting Lilypond to OS/2 - eCS - Arca Noae

[Mentore]

Hello all,
currently we OS/2 users can benefit from at least four or five music typesetting programs:

• NotaMusica 2.6 (beta 2.7) - commercial, discontinued
• Plain MusixTeX - pretty uncommon, powerful but TeX is required (and am I right in saying we really lack a current TeX?)
• MUP MUsic Publisher (ported by me, not up to date with the current release) - easy to compile, requires text input
• ABC Music composer (idem)
• Philip's Music Writer (idem)
• Lastly, we should have also some simple guitar fakebook software like Chordii or Chordpro (ported by me)

Now I'd really love if we could make one step beyond and start using some real beast like LilyPond. I actually am not able to fire up my old eCS box (pretty old indeed - at least 4 years without upgrading hardware), but I'd like to tackle this huge piece of art. I know it still needs text input just like ABC or Mup, but it seems to have more features, so...

Now for the serious part. Among the requirements I can see Guile 1.8.8 and some other things it needs:

    GNU Autoconf
    GNU Bison                       (Use version 2.0 or newer.)
    GNU Compiler Collection  (Use version 3.4 or newer (4.x recommended)).
    GNU gettext                    (0.17 or newer)
    GNU Make                       (Use version 3.78 or newer.)

These listed above we should already have. I'm not sure about the following ones (my thoughts on them in italic):

    Flex
    FontForge (recommended using at least 20100501); it must also be compiled with the ‘--enable-double’ switch, else this can lead to inaccurate intersection calculations which end up with poorly-rendered glyphs in the output.

    MetaFont
    The mf-nowin, mf, mfw or mfont binaries are usually packaged along with TeX.
    MetaPost
    The mpost binary is also usually packaged with TeX.
So, we should indeed have TeX updated!!!

    Perl
    Texinfo (Use version 4.11 or newer.)

    Type 1 utilities (Use version 1.33 or newer.)
    Cyrillic fonts (Often packaged in repositories as texlive-lang-cyrillic.)

    TeX Gyre ‘OTF’ font packages. As of LilyPond version 2.19.26, the previous default serif, san serif and monospace fonts now use Tex Gyre’s Schola, Heros and Cursor fonts respectively. Also See Fonts.

    The following font families are required:
    Schola, Heros and Cursor.

What are your thoughts about this? Do you think it's actually possible for us to have this beast under OS/2? (Yes I'd love to use it with my machine without having to boot a Linux / Win PC).

[Neil Waldhauer]

I think most or all of the requirements you are listing can be installed on OS/2 with rpm/yum.

If you are already a Linux user, then maybe you can build Lilypond on Linux. Then you can try to do the same on OS/2 with the same or similar shell and tools.

[Dave Yeo]

It depends on fontforge, which is a GTK program IIRC, or at least depends on X, so not trivial to build though the dependency page does say some of the text modes can be built without X. Unluckily porting GTK would likely be akin to porting QT.

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

and am I right in saying we really lack a current TeX?

Yes, unfortunately. The most recent one is the teTeX port from 2006. IIRC, Alex said on WarpStock that he has packaged it. Was it .rpm? But apparently, that's still not ready.

(I'm interested in newer TeX distributions. teTeX 3.0 is the only TeX distro for OS/2 that should work with the beamer package, which requires PGF.)

[Mentore]

It depends on fontforge, which is a GTK program IIRC, or at least depends on X, so not trivial to build though the dependency page does say some of the text modes can be built without X. Unluckily porting GTK would likely be akin to porting QT.

Thanks everybody.
So I was correct in thinking the first step is building the latest TeX distro - which is pretty funny: the CTAN seems to me a little cumbersome to browse for the sources. I will surely take a look at it.
Then it comes to FontForge which I have to watch closely, in order to see if it can be built without GTK.

Too many toolkits, too little time...

Mentore

[Olafur Gunnlaugsson]

Given that LilyPond is more of an engraving program than a traditional notation program and thus not very user friendly would something like MuseScore not make more sense? Or does that have even more dependencies?

BTW. For those with not very advanced needs when it comes to notation, old versions of Personal Composer run fine under OS/2, 16 bit version under WinOS/2 and 32 bit versions PE'ised.

[Mentore]

Given that LilyPond is more of an engraving program than a traditional notation program and thus not very user friendly would something like MuseScore not make more sense? Or does that have even more dependencies?

BTW. For those with not very advanced needs when it comes to notation, old versions of Personal Composer run fine under OS/2, 16 bit version under WinOS/2 and 32 bit versions PE'ised.

Hi Olafur, yes you're right - and I've already ported other engraving programs, so the need for this was more like "OK, I want to add another one to the list". And after NotaMusica has been discontinued I think we could do with a real notation software - but I'm afraid something like MuseScore is really out of our league due to its dependencies. This MAY change now that we are really close to a  complete Qt 5.13 release, but my mileage may vary.

I'd like to take a look at some opensource notation software but almost everyone is rather huge or uses libraries like JACK which may make it impossible to port. I'll take a look when I will fire up my OS/2 machine again.

[Mentore]

Given that LilyPond is more of an engraving program than a traditional notation program and thus not very user friendly would something like MuseScore not make more sense? Or does that have even more dependencies?

BTW. For those with not very advanced needs when it comes to notation, old versions of Personal Composer run fine under OS/2, 16 bit version under WinOS/2 and 32 bit versions PE'ised.

Hi Olafur, yes you're right - and I've already ported other engraving programs, so the need for this was more like "OK, I want to add another one to the list". And after NotaMusica has been discontinued I think we could do with a real notation software - but I'm afraid something like MuseScore is really out of our league due to its dependencies. This MAY change now that we are really close to a  complete Qt 5.13 release, but my mileage may vary.

I'd like to take a look at some opensource notation software but almost everyone is rather huge or uses libraries like JACK which may make it impossible to port. I'll take a look when I will fire up my OS/2 machine again.

Oh, just a last update: I saw that some GUI programs (mainly Denemo and Canorus) are UIs to LilyPond, so I'm starting to think the (two or three  ) OS/2-powered musicians could take advantage from this. I'll see what I can do when my OS/2 boxes will be back.

Mentore