LilyPond Contributor's Guide: 4.8 Concurrent stable and development versions

## 4.8 Concurrent stable and development versions

It can be useful to have both the stable and the development versions of Lilypond available at once. One way to do this on GNU/Linux is to install the stable version using the precompiled binary, and run the development version from the source tree. After running `make all` from the top directory of the Lilypond source files, there will be a binary called `lilypond` in the `out` directory:

>     <path to>/lilypond/out/bin/lilypond

This binary can be run without actually doing the `make install` command. The advantage to this is that you can have all of the latest changes available after pulling from git and running `make all`, without having to uninstall the old version and reinstall the new.

So, to use the stable version, install it as usual and use the normal commands:

>     lilypond foobar.ly

To use the development version, create a link to the binary in the source tree by saving the following line in a file somewhere in your `$PATH`:

>     exec <path to>/lilypond/out/bin/lilypond "$@"

Save it as `Lilypond` (with a capital L to distinguish it from the stable `lilypond`), and make it executable:

>     chmod +x Lilypond

Then you can invoke the development version this way:

>     Lilypond foobar.ly

TODO: ADD

- other compilation tricks for developers

#### LilyPond — Contributor’s Guide