[PoC] EXPERIMENTAL binaries of LilyPond 2.22.1

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Before starting: These builds are not official, highly experimental,
and not meant for "production" installations. They use Guile 2.2 and
are slower, might not compile all scores or break some advanced feature
that you might use. The binaries might eat your files or do other bad
things to your computer - you've been warned!

... That said, you are of course very welcome to read on:

Hi all,

I revived my efforts from last year to work on a new way to build
binaries and possibly replacing GUB. For details on the ideas, see
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2020-03/msg00337.html
and the explanations at https://github.com/hahnjo/lilypond-binaries

After some work, I built binaries from the released sources of LilyPond
2.22.1 for
 * Linux (compiled on CentOS 7; tested on Arch, CentOS 8, Ubuntu 18.04)
 * FreeBSD (compiled on FreeBSD 11.4; works on FreeBSD 12.2 and 13.0)
 * macOS (compiled on macOS 10.15 (x86_64); hopefully works on Big Sur)
 * mingw / Windows (x86_64, meaning 64-bit; I hope it still works...)
and uploaded them next to the scripts used to create them:
https://github.com/hahnjo/lilypond-binaries/releases/tag/2021-05-13
For each platform, there is one "full" package that includes wrappers
and interpreters for the scripts; the non-"full" packages expect the
system to provide python3 for using the scripts. The packages are plain
tar / zip archives, just extract them wherever you want and use the
executables in the bin/ directory.

Feel free to give them a try, but please keep in mind the limitations:
Guile 2.2 and no compiled bytecode [1] means startup will take around 3
seconds. Also I'd like to note that the scripts are a proof-of-concept,
especially the choice of shell scripts earned me some criticism. If the
ideas are worthwhile to follow, I'm open to considering Python as long
as we can avoid some problems that I see in GUB's design.

Cheers
Jonas


1: I tried to include bytecode, but LilyPond 2.22.1 doesn't know how to
load it. If you're curious, you can get it on your system by compiling
a dummy score with GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE=1 set on the command line. If
there's sufficient interest, I could make a build of 2.23.x with it...

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