[fpc-pascal] Lazarus IDE Question

[David Chandler]

I need to follow up on my own question, having done some more 
experimenting.  I discovered that although the menu system locks up when 
I do a "Run" from within the Lazarus environment (Version 0.9.10 beta), 
if I get out of the IDE and double click on the exe file that was 
produced it works fine.  I still don't know if the reason Lazarus 
produces bad results is because of a faulty configuration on my part or 
a genuine bug.  The error message I get when I stop the program is 
"Project raised external exception class 'Externals: SIGSEGV'".

I tried stepping through the program with the debugger.  What I got were 
various messages saying Lazarus couldn't find different inc files.  It 
gave me an opportunity to supply my own path, so after searching around 
I provided a path (C:\lazarus\fpcsrc\rtl\inc\...), after which it kept 
working.

After exiting the program I tried finding where I could set the path and 
found Compiler Options under the Project menu, which had a place to give 
paths to different kinds of files.  I set the path as above and got this 
message when the program compiled again:

File C:\lazarus\fpcsrc\rtl\inc\genstr.inc is newer than Release PPU 
file, C:\lazarus\pp\units\i386-win32\rtl\strings.ppu

along with a similar message for all the other inc files.  I have no 
idea what this really means, but it makes me wonder what version of FPC 
Lazarus is using.  (I have a separate installed copy of FPC, but Lazarus 
apparently has its own built in with no apparent way to redirect it to a 
different version.)  Despite the messages, the program went ahead and 
built, with the same flaw as before.

So that is the state of my experimentation. 

David Chandler wrote:

> I created a bare-bones do-nothing test menu and double clicked each 
> menu option to create an empty procedure in response to a mouse 
> click.  If I have no submenus, everything seems to work.  But if I add 
> submenus, the menu system locks up.
>
> One of my questions is, do I need to create click-handling procedures 
> for the menu items whose only function is to open a submenu?  The 
> system locks up whether I create these procedures or not, but I can't 
> imagine what I would put in such a procedure if it were required.  Is 
> there some other property I need to set to get the menu system to 
> work?  Is there a tutorial or documentation (short of reading the 
> source code) that leads me through this learning process?  (I feel 
> awkward having to rely on the mailing list for questions I would 
> normally be able to answer for myself reading a book or online 
> document.  I have been using Mastering Delphi 6, by the way, on the 
> assumption that the Lazarus IDE is roughly equivalent.)
> --David Chandler