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The basis of the problem is that with Catalina (OS X 10.15) Apple has withdrawn support for any application not compiled for 64 bits.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.
Existing lilypond binaries for OSX are all 32 bit. As has been stated multiple times, these will not run on Catalina.
Let us know if this link works.
64-bit binaries can be compiled from source on OSX using MacPorts.
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?
Nobody knows how to do this right now. If you wish, you can blame the lilypond community. I don’t think that will help anything. You could also blame Apple, but that won’t help anything either.
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?
Believe me, we understand the issue. We just don’t know how to solve it now.
Apple refuses to let anybody use Xcode for building on any non-Apple hardware.
Our build system is based on non-Apple hardware.
A number of people are trying different approaches to get at a 64-bit Mac binary. There will be nothing magical about 2.20 for a 64-bit binary. 2.20 could easily come out without a 64-bit Mac binary. And it is possible that a 64-bit Mac binary could be produced before 2.20 is released.
It is also possible (although I hope it is not the case) that there will never be a 64-bit lilypond binary distribution for OSX. It all depends on having one or more volunteers step up to make it happen. We have no employees. We have no funding. Most of our developers are very experienced in the Linux world; I think it’s an amazing blessing that we have ever had binaries for OSX and Windows. Do you have any ideas where we might get developers who are skilled in OSX development to join the project?
Note that we have Marnen and Werner working pretty hard to get something working. You can follow the discussion on lilypond-devel if you’d like more information.
Thanks,
Carl