[fpc-devel] The future of fpmake

[Darius Blaszyk]

Hi,

I'm using fpmake more and more in my projects (large or small) and from time to time I come across some limitations that need to be resolved. In the past I have supplied a number of small patches which were normally applied without problems, but sometimes I was sent back (mostly with good reasons) to rethink a patch. However as I noted in http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=18151this approach is sometimes like a "trial and error" strategy and I would prefer if we could create something like a roadmap for fpmake and put that up on the wiki.
Because it's a FPC program it's of course always possible to add functionality yourself. The question though is, what will FPC support out of the box.

A couple of things that come to mind:

- generation of documentation (fpdoc and possible other??)
- compilation of example files
- compilation and running of the testsuite
- generation of the classchart
- execute fpmake from command line (see thread by mattias : "run pascal programs as script") for this we would need instantfpc to support win32 and it should be supplied as a standard fpc tool
- implement the creation of installer (scripts) for all platforms
- implement a binary zip option
- managing debug/release builds (also cross-compiling)
- cmake like system (display and store information on builds and test suites, etc)

BTW: I suppose testsuite and example files could be compiled by a separate fpmake file, but it sounds not logical to create a separate package for that, or does it?

Of course these are all nice to haves, but agreeing what is in and what definitely not does not hurt. All "out of scope" functionality could be added to an external fmkextunit.

Regards, Darius