[fpc-devel] Where to add mksymbian

[Tomas Hajny]

Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jul 2007, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote:
>> On 7/3/07, Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
>> > I thought it was only needed to build FPC ?
>>
>> No, it's necessary to build software for symbian os.
>>
>> The way I designed it you can't simply type: fpc -Tsymbian
>> mysoftware.pas
>>
>> And expect to have a symbian executable.
>>
>> This command fails to give enougth information for a real build, which
>> includes the UIDs, if you want to build for the emulator or the real
>> devide, which sdk you are using, where the sdk is located, etc, etc.
>>
>> Because symbian has many unique things I decided to create a external
>> build tool, which just uses fpc to generate assembler. The other
>> option would be adding lot's of symbian specific options on fpc, but I
>> didn't like this idea.
>
> I think you made a right choice :-)

Actually, I could imagine that the final version might be better
integrated with FPC for better consistency with other platforms (that
certainly doesn't mean that the current solution is wrong - especially
considering the current "work in progress" status) and thus possibly
higher user-friendliness for FPC users interested in developing for this
platform (possibility to use the same configuration files, common
documentation of command-line options, no need to install special tools,
etc.).

Part of the stuff mentioned above could be probably supported by FPC in a
transparent way (paths to SDK libraries and include files, emulator and
real device supported as two different targets sharing RTL and most of the
platform-specific infrastructure, and possibly others), others could be
indeed handled by platform-specific command line options (we already have
platform-specific options anyway and it's possible that some of the newly
required ones may be re-useable for other current or future target
platforms).

Tomas