[fpc-pascal] Free Pascal 2.4.0 released

[Juha Manninen]

On lauantai, 2. tammikuuta 2010 04:53:16 Doug Chamberlin wrote:
> For my new year's resolution I'm going to commit to FPC and Lazarus. So,
> I'm installing the latest in a fresh Ubuntu 9.10 VM and diving in. I'll
> be pushing all this software hard and will probably be coming here for
>  help.
> 
> First problem: I downloaded the 32bit Linux (fpc-2.4.0.i386-linux.tar)
> and unpacked it into "~/ins/fpc 2.4.0" and ran "sudo ./install.sh".
> Immediately I ran into a problem because the directory I was installing
> from contained an embedded space in the name.
> 
> It really should be documented as a requirement to not have embedded
> spaces. Or, better yet, the install script should be updated to allow
> for them. Or, at least, the install script should be updated to detect
> them and stop gracefully.
> 
> How can we get this done?
> 
> As far as I can see there is NO documentation in the installation
> tarball. Just the install script. Can't a readme file be added with this
> little detail?

I also looked at FPC page and wiki page and there are no instructions for 
installation! How is it possible?
The only link for FPC installation is buried under Lazarus documentation (!) :
  http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/buildfaq.pdf
which is even too detailed as the wiki page mentions.

Things are easy if there is a distro package for FPC. I am sure the main 
distros will have a package for fpc 2.4.0 in few days.

Otherwise, installation should be documented. I never installed from a tar 
pack but I did install the latest development version from SVN. It was easy to 
install by running "make all" and "make install". But, it was not documented! 
I made a guess and started "make all" and then asked from this list if I am 
doing the right thing. The answer was: Yes.
Why can't there be a README.TXT file at SVN root directory saying it?

Also, spaces in directory names should be allowed because the file system 
allows them. If not, then this limitation should be documented clearly.


Regards,
Juha Manninen