Frescobaldi runs Lilypond forever on startup

[John Kelly]

When I start Frescobaldi, it pops up a dialog box: "Running LilyPond (this may take a while)" with a progress bar already filled in with blue, as if it were almost complete, and a "Cancel" button. I left it running overnight and it never finished.

What's going on? What's Frescobaldi trying to do? Why can't it finish? Why is it running LilyPond on startup anyway, before it even has a file to work on?

Thanks to anyone who can answer these questions.

[Federico Bruni]

Hi John

I had a similar issue (on Linux) years ago. I closed Frescobaldi and
when I restarted the problem disappeared.

I think Frescobaldi is checking if LilyPond is installed and what
version.

You did not write which operating system and which version of
Frescobaldi you are using. Did it happen right after a new installation?
If you are using Windows, I suggest you first uninstall Frescobaldi and
then reinstall it from scratch. So you'll avoid also this bug:
https://github.com/frescobaldi/frescobaldi/issues/1252

[Wilbert Berendsen]

Op Mon, 1 Feb 2021 12:25:08 -0800 (PST)
John Kelly <vonho...@gmail.com> schreef:

> When I start Frescobaldi, it pops up a dialog box: "Running LilyPond
> (this may take a while)" with a progress bar already filled in with
> blue, as if it were almost complete, and a "Cancel" button. I left it
> running overnight and it never finished.

Wow that's definitely too long ;-)

> What's going on? What's Frescobaldi trying to do? Why can't it
> finish? Why is it running LilyPond on startup anyway, before it even
> has a file to work on?

When installing a new version of LilyPond, frescobaldi runs it once, to
get some information. And it is a known issue that LilyPond can run
very long in its own right when run for the first time, especially on
Windows, because it needs to build a fontconfig cache.

That might be the problem. However, that can take minutes but not
hours. Thanks for the bugreport!

Indeed the progress dialog needs at least a cancel button :-)


--
Wilbert Berendsen (www.wilbertberendsen.nl)