Re:Lilypond on OS X Catalina

[Allan Kinnaird]

I have been disappointed by the responses on this and related threads. It seems to me that many of the responders have not fully absorbed the questions.

The basis of the problem is that with Catalina (OS X 10.15) Apple has withdrawn support for any application not compiled for 64 bits.

So, any application compiled for 32 bits is likely not to run, and there is strong evidence that existing versions of Lilypond do not.

The binaries available on Lilypond.org for the stable release v2.18.2 (23 March 2014) and unstable release 2.19.23 (23 March 2019) are compiled for 32 bits and will not run on Catalina 10.15.

Some threads make reference to MacPorts - the MacPorts site gives indications of runnability for OS X v10.14, but none for v10.15.

In any case, I have found (personally) that MacPorts does not play well with other package managers. I use Homebrew, with which I am very happy, and have found in the past that it is unwise to mix the two. I avoid MacPorts.

I have been using Liiypond and Frescobaldi for years with no problem, with dependencies handled by Homebrew.

Most of us “Lilypond users” (is that not the target of this thread?) are not really interested in forcing five-year-old code into use by clever compilation techniques.

We just want to continue to use stable Lilypond on our current computer system by whatever means we did in the past. How can we do this?

I believe that the real question is when a 64-bit Mac binary will appear on lilypond.org - I would expect v2.20.0 or thereabouts. Does anyone have a solid timetable?