[fpc-devel] fpmake / fppkg (are great!)

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Joost van der Sluis wrote:
> With this release we also want to test our new packaging-system. After
> installing the package manager (fppkg) can be called from the
> command-line. For now only the 'lnet' package is available for
> installation through the package system. When all goes well it could be
> that more packages will be added.
> 
> For more information about fppkg:
> http://wiki.freepascal.org/fppkg

I adjusted my own engine to be buildable and installable by fpmake, and
it seems to work mighty fine. Installing lnet by fppkg also went totally
easy.

It would be great to have fpmake system adopted by a lot of FPC
libraries. It would be even better to have a lot of packages available
from default fppkg package repository
(http://www.freepascal.org/repository/packages.xml). It makes the
compilation and installation trivial (right now, most(?) people use
custom methods in their libraries, special allunits.pas units and such;
even when it works Ok, it's better to have standardized method for this;
Makefile.fpc approach seem to never catch up). Another advantage is that
fppkg knows about dependencies. E.g. my game engine will soon depend on
lnet, so installing my game engine by fppkg could automatically pull
also lnet.

So when submission to the official fppkg registry will be open ---
please let us know :)

BTW, I just committed a lot of updates to
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPMake, correcting many examples to be
compatible with fpmkunit interface in FPC 2.2.2 and 2.2.4rc1. I just
started my fun with fpmake, so if anyone is more knowledgeable in this,
please correct or revert any blunders I made.

Michalis