lilypond-doc-2.4.3-1 using setup.exe 2.457.2.1 fails to display music images

[John Sellers]

This is an interesting problem.  In principle I should be able to 
articulate a correct way of doing things without dealing with issues 
about symbolic links, or other quirks of Windows or Cygwin.  I don't 
know if I can or not, but here is a stab at it.  I will be interested in 
knowing what you think of my attempt:

I am sure there are many ways to do make the music displays work in a 
functionally correct fashion.  Here is one:

It seems to me, that a correct way to handle this is make sure that the 
HTML is set up right, in which case it should do the right thing 
regardless of whether it is in a Windows or Cygwin browser.  If Lilypond 
is doing the right thing, then we should find the same HTML in any 
Cygwin or Windows in a successful packaging of Lilypond in any Cygwin, 
Lilypond in Cygwin under Windows, or Lilypond in Windows without 
Cygwin.  This should be so because HTML is an Internet thing, not an 
operating system dependent thing.

Now it gets tricky if you have no control over the Windows concerns when 
installing Lilypond under Cygwin.  It suggests that we don't want to 
care about paths or link types in Cygwin in order to make the HTML work, 
because they would be dependent on the Cygwin environment and operating 
system.  This suggests that a good approach for Lilypond is to make sure 
that their HTML files, whether relative or absolute paths, should be 
consistent and embedded in a generic directory structure which Lilypond 
distributes for all target systems.

On the other hand, if we do care about paths because we want to put 
things where they make sense for the operating system of choice, then 
the Lilypond packaging should have macro expansion which can map any of 
the target operating systems.  This is no problem because it is what 
make commands are for.  However it starts to get nasty real fast if we 
want things to work in the mother operating system, such as Windows XP.  
It seems to me that in this case the cygwin environment itself has some 
responsibility to properly map its paths to the operating system it is 
installed within.  That sounds ugly to me, and frankly I don't know how 
this kind of problem is systematically handled these days.  It has been 
several years since I have been active.

---John

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:

>Igor Pechtchanski writes:
>
>  
>
>>Wouldn't it be better to just change the HTML file so that they
>>refer to the images in the correct relative directory?
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, but someone has to fix makeinfo to support images that are not
>in the same directory as the resulting documentation is.
>
>Jan.
>
>  
>

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