[fpc-devel] Problems with makefiles, fpcmake, Package.fpc and fppkg

[Joost van der Sluis]

On Mon, 2010-09-13 at 09:03 +0200, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 12 Sep 2010, Joost van der Sluis wrote:
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Seems like that after all these years there are still bugs in fpc's
> > makefiles...
> >
> > When you install a package, not the Package.fpc which is generated for
> > the whole package, but the Package.fpc generated for the last
> > sub-package is installed into
> > xxx/<version>/units/<target>/<packagename>.
> >
> > Normally not really a problem, but fppkg uses these files to resolve
> > dependencies. But the dependencies of the sub-package could be different
> > from the dependencies of the main package.
> >
> > Example: when you do 'make install' in fcl-web, a Package.fpc will be
> > installed without the dependency on fcl-db. (In fact a Package.fpc made
> > for jsonrpc is installed, which doesn't depend on fcl-db)
> >
> > The result is that if you have fcl-web installed using fpcmake, and you
> > want to install some other package using fpmake that depends on fcl-web,
> > that will fail.
> >
> > Shall I submit a bug-report for fpcmake with a request to use the proper
> > Package.fpc file?
> 
> No, in no case.

I think we should.

> The whole idea of fppkg & fpmake is to get totally rid of fpcmake. 
> Your proposal implies its continued use.

We need it to make a smooth transition. As long as people have packages
installed using the fpcmake-makefiles (which is as long as released
fpc-versions still use this system, which bill be a long time...), we
need this backward-compatibility. 

> I think that fpmake should output the proper dependencies based on the
> dependencies specified in it. This output can be written to Package.fpc.
> (although I don't understand why it is in a Package.fpc, dependencies
> should be in the central package repository)

If you use fpmake to install a package, a file named 'fpunits.conf' is
created. In that case everything works.

But fpcmake creates a file named Package.cfg. When fpmake can't find a
file named 'fpunits.conf', it searches and uses the Package.cfg file. If
this file contains the wrong information, fpmake can't process the
installed packages all right.

This is about installed packages, which maybe could not even exist in
the central repository. The 'local' repository is nothing more than the
sum of all fpunits.conf and Package.fpc files.

The problem I have now is that I want to add package that depends in
fcl-web. Most users have fcl-web installed using the fpcmake-system.
(That's after all what we use by default) When you try to install this
package depending on fcl-web, it won't detect the dependency on fcl-db,
since the Package.fpc from fcl-web is invalid. So you can't build this
new package.

So as long as this problem isn't fixed in fpcmake, we can't use fpmake
for packages which are installed using fpcmake. Iow: we can't make
package which have dependencies on any package which comes with Free
Pascal. (As long as we don't switch to fpmake entirely)

So in principle your statement is right: fixing this will lead to a
(long) period that both systems can be used at the same time. But I
doubt that forcing a transition at once, will lead to a faster
acceptance of fpmake.  ;)

Joost