[fpc-devel] Status of dynamic packages

[Sven Barth]

On 25.01.2017 21:40, Mattias Gaertner wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Nov 2016 17:29:50 +0100
> Sven Barth <pascaldragon at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Am 10.11.2016 15:17 schrieb "gabor" <gabor at poczta.onet.pl>:
>>>
>>> Hello.
>>> What's the status of dynamic packages? Are they usable?  
>>
>> Currently only compile time packages work (meaning you can't load
>> additional packages at runtime). Also currently only i386-win32 and the OS
>> X targets (I did only test powerpc-darwin however) would be supported if
>> packages would be enabled.
>> Additionally there still needs to be fpmake support for dynamic packages
>> added (so that the ppk is generated based on the fpmake.pp and that it
>> indeed compiles the package).
> 
> If someone wants to help with it, what skills/knowledge are required and
> what are the next steps?

For the compiler/RTL there isn't much that can be done as I'll need to
redesign the unit initialization and finalization as well as prepare the
RTL for a more dynamic approach regarding various tables.

What could be helped with however would be fpmake since that would need
to be able to generate package files and compile them along with the
units if the target supports dynamic packages (cause I don't want to
maintain a parallel .ppk file). I've already asked Joost on Core whether
he'd be inclined to do that, but I haven't received an answer, so I
don't know whether he read my mail or even already started working on it...

Regards,
Sven