[fpc-pascal] OS/2 INF help support

[Tomas Hajny]

On Wed, September 9, 2009 09:24, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> Tomas Hajny het geskryf:
>>
>> Probably clear from the previous discussion in the meantime, but anyway
>> -
>> neither LCL nor Lazarus itself have been ported to OS/2.
>
> Yup, sorry to hear that. I'll add OS/2 support as a feature request for
> fpGUI Toolkit. It's relatively easy to add new backends to fpGUI - at
> least much less work than LCL as far as I can see. Anyway, that will
> give me an excuse to dust off my copies of OS/2 2.1, Warp 3.0 Connect
> (still my favourite release) and Warp v4. Wow, that will bring back good
> memories. I was a huge OS/2 supporter in the day. :-)
>
> How well does FPC support OS/2?

To be honest, the support is not so good as with some other platforms,
there are several known issues and limitations. One of the problematic
areas are limitations related to the ancient EMX (GNU) ld linker (and also
other parts of the GNU toolchain like the debugger); it would be better to
switch to another linker, but that is a non-trivial task, unfortunately,
because it implies many changes also in other areas). One additional area
is the well-known 32-bit/16-bit thunking (support of a special calling
convention necessary for invoking some of the old 16-bit API still used
for console support is not available in FPC, but that is solvable using
wrapper DLL like emxwrap.dll). Finally, some parts of the RTL are not
debugged that well (or not even finished completely) and some FCL packages
have not been ported to OS/2 yet. I'm willing to assist in solving these
areas, but my time available for FPC is unfortunately rather limited and
thus the progress is very slow.

Tomas