[fpc-devel]Bunch'o questions for the new year

[Eric Grange]

First, Happy New Year!

I've started investigating FPC support for GLScene (http://glscene.org),
and have encountered a few issues:

1)are there any instruction on building FreePascal? I've got the CVS sources,
   tried several makefiles and .bat, browsed the READMEs, but couldn't get
   a compile to complete (this is under Win32, using the 1.9.0 release).

2)while compiling my units, I bumped on a compiler crash (now reported in
   the bugs with a sample unit), then managed to somehow work around it, but now
   the compilation fails with no errors. Ie. FPC's return value indicates a
   failed compile, and the .exe is not generated, but no error is listed.
   When compiling with '-va', nothing suspicious is listed and the ld.exe stage
   is reached. Any hints on extra verbose options that could shed more light?

3)while waiting for Lazarus, I've started work on an IDE expert for Delphi 7,
   which add FPC compile and options menu to the IDE. The compile side is now more
   or less operationnal (incl. error hyperlinks), and I've started investigating
   the debug side. Full debug support is quite certainly out of reach (and IMO
   better left to Lazarus), however ASM based debugging is possible (using the
   CPU view and Delphi's AttachTo command). What I'm after would be adding a few
   helper functions to convert pascal file/line number to EXE offset and vice-versa.
   This would allow basic breakpoint and trace support.
   Any suggestions on the most suitable debug format for this purpose that FPC 1.9.0
   would already generates? Any links/docs on that format?
   (the expert is available from the Utilities directory of GLScene CVS at sourceforge,
   if an FPC guru wants to pick oversights and errors with how things are
   done/displayed...)

4)the '-B' option is listed for Build support, but doesn't seem to rebuild units
   if their code (file timestamp actually) hasn't changed. Is this a misunderstanding
   from my part or a bug?

5)do the snapshots include binaries, and if so, from which mirror should I download?
   (tried a few links from the website, but all failed)

Other than that things went quite smoothly, I haven't compiled/run anything really
complex yet, but the extra hints/warnings of FPC allowed to catch a few bugs Delphi
had missed, which is always nice :)

Eric