Self-compiled LilyPond with Frescobaldi 4.0.7 on MacOS

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Lukas-Fabian Moser

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Oct 9, 2026, 3:34:16 PM (3 days ago) Oct 9

to Frescobaldi, lilypond-user Mailing List (lilypond-user@gnu.org), Gabriel Ellsworth

Dear all,

after succeeding to build LilyPond from a cloned git repository on MacOS, Gabriel Ellsworth and I ran into problems trying to use our lilypond binary in Frescobaldi 4.0.7:

Compilations failed with the fatal error

In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
1755:12 1 (with-exception-handler _ _ #:unwind? _ #:unwind-for-type _)
In unknown file:
0 (apply-smob/0 #<thunk 10af942e0>)

ERROR: In procedure apply-smob/0:
In procedure primitive-load-path: Unable to find file "lily/lily" in load path
Exited with return code 1.

After some digging, we discovered the cause of the problem: The MacOS file picker (that we used to make Frescobaldi aware of our custom LilyPond version) resolves symlinks! So, instead of

[git-repository]/build/out/bin/lilypond

we automatically got referred to

[git-repository]/build/lily/out/lilypond

which does not work, since LilyPond's algorithm for locating its data and libraries (namely in ../share/lilypond/ relative to the binary's directory) then fails.

So, we have two things to report:

It is currently possible to self-compile LilyPond 2.27.2 on MacOS.
The file picker dialogue in Frescobaldi is broken in this situation; the correct path to the LilyPond binary in ../build/out/bin must be entered manually.

If it would be possible to change the file picker's behaviour (so that it does not automatically resolve symlinks), this might be an improvement.