The right version of LilyPond for OS X

There's been some craziness regarding the correct version of LilyPond for OS X users for sometime. The LilyPond download page ...

   http://lilypond.org/web/install/

... lists three different situations:

• MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard)
  
• MacOS X (Intel) 10.4
  
• MacOS X (G3, G4, G5) 10.3 and newer
  

I find all three of these a touch confusing. So here's what works for me.

I have a MacOS X (Intel) 10.4 iMac at home. And, happily, clicking on the corresponding link on the LilyPond download page always works. The only confusing bit, however, is that you if you inspect downloaded executable in the Finder (using cmd-I for 'info'), the info box that the Finder shows you will say that the application is 'Application (PowerPC)'.



I *think* this is just a mistake. But I've never been certain. Anyway, the point is that the MacOS X (Intel) 10.4 link on the LilyPond download site does indeed work, even if the binary is mislabelled.

The situation with my MacBook running Leopard is more complicated. I have never once followed the MacOS X (Leopard) 10.5 link on the LilyPond download page. The link takes you away from the LilyPond site and has a bunch of instructions that have never made much sense to me. Happily, though, what does work for me is to download from the MacOS (G3, G4, G5 Macs) 10.3 and newer link on the LilyPond download page.

Now this is highly counterintuitive. It seems like downloading a binary for the old, old type of Mac hardware would be exactly the wrong thing to do for a MacBook made of the (almost) newest type of Mac hardware. But this does in fact work.

I think the one caveat here is that I never use the LilyPond GUI and always call LilyPond from the commandline. I think that running the LilyPond GUI on my MacBook with the old G3 version of the binary would probably fail.