-an and help page (Was: Re: [fpc-devel] Re: Episode 4. Addressing and it's limits Part Two)

[Tomas Hajny]

On Thu, February 9, 2012 11:49, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> steve smithers wrote:
>>> rvmartin2 at ntlworld.com wrote on Wed, 8 Feb 2012 14:16:50 +0000 (GMT)
 .
 .
> Note that to get this level of detail the compiler has to be built with
> -dEXTDEBUG in order to enable the -an option, despite the fact that this
> always appears in fpc's -h output. If it were my choice I'd make that
> bit of help output conditional.

Making it conditional isn't possible without modifying the structure used
in the message files (plain text files to allow easy translation /
localization to other languages) or their concept / the way how they are
used.

As it works now, the default (English) text file is translated into an
include file containing all texts and compiled into the compiler
executable (but another file with the same structure but written in a
different language may be supplied on the command line and override the
default on run-time). The only conditional parts in the message files are
related to platforms and targets (which is a limited set of dependencies
by definition); -dEXTDEBUG based dependency doesn't fit into that. The
easier solution would be probably adding a note about this dependency
directly into the help page (I or anybody else in the core team can do
that if it really works that way - i.e., if there is no difference between
-an and -a in a compiler compiled without -dEXTDEBUG).

Tomas