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

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Michalis Kamburelis wrote:

> 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 :)

As soon as it is tested sufficiently, and documented properly :-)

The idea is that at least the FPC packages would also be put in the registry.
This would allow us to distribute newer versions more quickly than now.

Note that the architecture is such that other people can also set
up repositories.

> 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.

I'll have a look at it as soon as time permits !

Michael.