[fpc-pascal] Free Pascal 2.4.0 released

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sat, 2 Jan 2010, Juha Manninen wrote:

> On lauantai, 2. tammikuuta 2010 04:53:16 Doug Chamberlin wrote:
>> For my new year's resolution I'm going to commit to FPC and Lazarus. So,
>> I'm installing the latest in a fresh Ubuntu 9.10 VM and diving in. I'll
>> be pushing all this software hard and will probably be coming here for
>>  help.
>>
>> First problem: I downloaded the 32bit Linux (fpc-2.4.0.i386-linux.tar)
>> and unpacked it into "~/ins/fpc 2.4.0" and ran "sudo ./install.sh".
>> Immediately I ran into a problem because the directory I was installing
>> from contained an embedded space in the name.
>>
>> It really should be documented as a requirement to not have embedded
>> spaces. Or, better yet, the install script should be updated to allow
>> for them. Or, at least, the install script should be updated to detect
>> them and stop gracefully.
>>
>> How can we get this done?
>>
>> As far as I can see there is NO documentation in the installation
>> tarball. Just the install script. Can't a readme file be added with this
>> little detail?
>
> I also looked at FPC page and wiki page and there are no instructions for
> installation! How is it possible?
> The only link for FPC installation is buried under Lazarus documentation (!) :
>  http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/buildfaq.pdf
> which is even too detailed as the wiki page mentions.

I guess you didn't read the documentation then.

It is published on the website:

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/user/user.html

Chapter 2 is all about installing.

In particular, section 2.2.1 says something about installing in a directory containing spaces in its name:

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/user/usersu3.html

>
> Things are easy if there is a distro package for FPC. I am sure the main
> distros will have a package for fpc 2.4.0 in few days.
>
> Otherwise, installation should be documented. I never installed from a tar
> pack but I did install the latest development version from SVN. It was easy to
> install by running "make all" and "make install". But, it was not documented!
> I made a guess and started "make all" and then asked from this list if I am
> doing the right thing. The answer was: Yes.
> Why can't there be a README.TXT file at SVN root directory saying it?

Because it is so obvious that no-one bothered to document it in an extra file.
If you made it to the point that you extracted the source from SVN, you should
know what to do next.

If I see a makefile, I always do 2 things:
make all
make install
If I see a 'configure' script, I do
configure --help
and after studying the options:
./configure --options-I-need
Which normally leaves me with the makefile. At which point: see above.

This is general programming knowledge. Someone who doesn't know that should not 
be installing from sources or attempt recompiling a compiler: they should use
a pre-packaged version instead. If they want to try anyway: Sure, and it is a 
great learning experience. For those that want to learn, compiling the compiler 
is treated in the programmer's reference:

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/prog/progap6.html

So saying that it is not documented is overstretching it a bit.

Michael.