[fpc-pascal] Best method to uninstall fpc and lazarus

[Jonas Maebe]

On 02 Sep 2008, at 09:05, Paul wrote:

> I want to uninstall and reinstall fpc and lazurus.
> My current installation is useless.
> I found the steps on Wiki, but I used the docs on Wiki to install  
> them and it totally went wrong.

The uninstall steps on the wiki at http://wiki.freepascal.org/OS_X_Programming_Tips#Uninstalling_Lazarus_and_Free_Pascal 
  are correct. I just went over them and changed them so they are by  
default for FPC 2.2.2. Make sure you also remove the .lazarus  
directory in your home directory as described at the end. I guess most  
of your problems are related to that one in fact.

When you install next time, I would recommend not to install Lazarus  
0.9.24 first and to go directly with 0.9.25. As for FPC itself, please  
use the official installer from http://www.freepascal.org and not the  
one from http://www.hu.freepascal.org/lazarus, because I believe that  
at one point in time the latter did not create a default FPC  
configuration file (I don't know whether this has been fixed in the  
mean time).

This means that it only works (worked) if you previously already  
installed an FPC release and did not remove its configuration file  
(but you will remove it by performing the uninstallation steps  
above).  The reason is that FPC configuration files are most of the  
time compatible between different versions, because all paths include  
variables which are replaced with the currently used FPC version.

It's no problem to use the fpcsrc package from that page (or to  
install the fpc-2.2.2 package from that page over an existing install  
of FPC).


Jonas

PS: uninstalling stuff uninstalled using the default Mac OS X  
installer /is/ unnecessarily hard and non-intuitive at this point. I  
have no idea why after all this time Apple still have not added a  
simple uninstall option. The only upside to this is that developers  
shy away as much as possible from using an installer, and instead opt  
(where possible) for drag-n-drop installations (whereby "uninstall" is  
reduced to "delete this folder").