[fpc-devel] what fpc is good for?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sun, 13 May 2007, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> > > > I also complained and complained about websnap and asp and php, and of course I also wrote some code
> > > > that solved my problem there which is all FPC based, the poor old wiki, forum, and other utilities
> > > > on my site that need updating. Others choose the easy solution and use ASP and PHP.. boring. I
> > > > complained about FPDOC and wrote some extensions for my own lufdoc, and I complained about numerous
> > > > other things and went ahead and wrote code.
> > > 
> > > fpdoc is IMHO a good thing, that unfortunately is not fully mature. It
> > > really needs a circle of dedicated users that report and submit patches.
> > 
> > Aaaargggh - a knife through my heart :-)
> > 
> > fpdoc not mature ? 
> > What about the 1700 pages of rtl/fcl documentation it creates ?
> > I'd rather hope that this is somewhat mature ? I'm not even talking about
> > the LCL, which will probably be a lot more than 1700 pages when printed...
> 
> Nobody disputes the size of docs. 

That was also not what I wanted to hint at, just that if fpdoc can
generate such an amount of pages from relatively difficult sources,
it seems to me that this is not alpha-quality anymore...

> I was more talking about not generating a
> Windows helpformat (on my todo for years), the array [] of ansistring  at

RTF is on the todo list and nearly done. 
.hlp or .chm is then a matter of adding some footnotes on the right places,
and running the windows help compiler.

> 
> http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/unix/fpexecle.html
> 
> not to speak of 
> 
> http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/sysutils/format.html

I'll have a look at them. Should not be hard to fix.

>  
> > It does what it was designed to do. It's not perfect, and there are still
> > some improvements that can be made, but it has steadily improved since 
> > day 1. And will continue to improve in the future.
> 
> > But alas, as so often, we loose the continuous struggle with time.
> 
> Which was the exactly what I meant to express.. Needs more continuous
> struggle from people with a direct interest to not let the improvement rate
> decrease.

Agreed 100% !

Not all at once, please. There is plenty of room for enthousiasts ;-)

Michael.