[fpc-devel] 2.0.4-rc3 available

[Dave Parsons]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:15:51 +0200 (CEST), Tomas Hajny wrote:

Hello Tomas,

> Dave Parsons wrote:
> > On Sun, 13 Aug 2006 23:08:29 +0200, Tomas Hajny wrote:
> 
> Hello Dave,

> > I'm new to this list and my interests are in Lazarus under
> > OS/2 and Linux and therefore by inference fpc.
> 
> Lazarus under OS/2? Well, this would still take some time, I guess... Are
> you planning to work on OS/2 support in Lazarus, or just interested to see
> it?

My primary interest I guess is a replacement for Kylix under Linux but
I would also like to be able to use Lazarus under OS/2 and OpenVMS, so
first of all I want to find out how far the project has come on these
three platforms. Especially important is whether Lazarus can compile
an existing program which I now maintain using Delphi 2005 on MSW and
Kylix on Linux. It currently uses Indy9 for networking in a large LAN
with Solaris and OpenVMS end users.
This is a mature program, started 13 years ago in Turbo Pascal,
in daily use by others and continually evolving to meet new
requirements.

I realize that OS/2 and OpenVMS are fringe operating systems so I
expect to have to do some development of both fpc & Lazarus there
myself, the question is really how much work i.e. time is required.

To help me, I would like to know for instance how to bootstrap fpc
on a new platform. What is the original compiler? Any form of
Pascal compiler, gcc or whatever.
How dependent on fpc is Lazarus?

>From what I have read, Lazarus uses Gtk as its widget set.
Gtk 1.2.10 is available on OpenVMS and a Gtk 2 has been spoken
about - one day perhaps. Same applies to OS/2. Is Gtk2 essential?

> > I tried to compile Lazarus with the last official fpc release,
> > os2200 a couple of days ago, but that was too old.
> >
> > So, thanks for this rc which I have downloaded and built
> > under OS/2.
> 
> Are you talking about compilation of FPC 2.0.4-rc3 sources under OS/2?
> OS/2 binaries of 2.0.4-rc2 were uploaded by me earlier. However, I got a
> SIGSEGV while trying to build rc3. I already had this in the past and it
> unfortunately largely depends on the exact environment (so e.g. it cannot
> be reproduced any more if compiling with debug information included :-(((
> ).

Yes I just downloaded fpcbuild-2.0.4-rc3.tar.gz, extracted the tar
using untgz, ( untgz failed to completely unpack it ) untarred it
with gnu tar and ran 'make os2' using the fpc from os2200.zip which
was the latest I could find.
After that it installed with 'make install'. The only error I
saw was the one about gdb.

> > I'm still feeling my way around so I'm not sure
> > that everything compiled that could be expected, but the
> > compiler and many executables are there and work.
> > I spotted one comment about GDB as the output scrolled
> > past that said that debugging would be unavailable.
> > Is this normal or a fault with my set up?
> 
> Well, I guess this refers to IDE compilation. Unfortunately, the OS/2
> version of GDB is based on ancient 4.16 sources and nobody managed to
> create libgdb.a which could be in turn used for including debugging
> support in our IDE. You can still debug with standalone GDB or the PMGDB
> add-on (both distributed with FPC too). BTW, I didn't include IDE (fp.exe)
> in RC1 and RC2 because it was crashing somewhere in the thunking code
> inside the EMX libraries (emxwrap.dll or emx.dll) while calling VioShowBuf
> (it worked correctly in the past, so I'm not sure what exactly happened
> there :-( ). I'd be interested to know whether your experience is
> different.

That sounds about right.
Re above and compilers, I did notice the EMX libs there, what are
they used for as etc., or is gcc involved somewhere. If it is have
you had a look at the Innotek builds, currently gcc-3.3.5 csd1.
I haven't used gdb much but I understand that the newer gccs from
Innotek are not compatible with the gdb we currently have.
This is of course a concern since the debugger is one of the main
strengths of a good IDE.

Cheers,
Dave