7.4 The makelsr.pl script

As you might have guessed already, makelsr.pl is a Perl script. Obviously, you need Perl to execute it, which you should now install in case it isn’t already available on your system.

There is a dependency on the Pandoc program, which the script uses to convert LSR’s snippet documentation strings (which are formatted in HTML) to Texinfo. This must be installed, too.

Furthermore, makelsr.pl needs a few additional modules that are not Perl core modules (tested with Perl version 5.36):

• File::Which
• IPC::Run3
• MySQL::Dump::Parser::XS
• Pandoc
• Parallel::ForkManager

Either install missing modules with your package manager (if available) or use the cpanm command.⁵

A typical call might me

cpanm --sudo Parallel::ForkManager

to download, compile, and install module ‘Parallel::ForkManager’.⁶

Finally, it needs to find the convert-ly script from the current LilyPond development build.

By default, executing makelsr.pl performs the following actions.

• Download a current MySQL dump of the LSR database (the dump is regenerated once a day).
• Delete all snippet and snippet list files in directory Documentation/snippets/ (but not in Documentation/snippets/new/).
• Extract all snippets from the LSR database that have the ‘docs’ tag set, convert their documentation parts from HTML to Texinfo with the pandoc program, run the script convert-ly to update their LilyPond code parts to current syntax, and store them in Documentation/snippets/.
• Create snippet list files named winds.snippet-list or connecting-notes.snippet-list that list the snippets grouped by tags assigned in the database. These files are used to structure LilyPond’s ‘snippets’ documentation.
• Convert all snippet files in Documentation/snippets/new/ with convert-ly and output them to Documentation/snippets/, possibly overwriting existing files.

This flow of actions can be adjusted; say ‘scripts/auxiliar/makelsr.pl --help’ to get a detailed description of the provided command-line options and used environment variables.