[fpc-pascal] Easy install of FPC and Lazarus

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Mon, 23 May 2011 14:52:10 +0200
Rainer Stratmann <RainerStratmann at t-online.de> wrote:

> Am Monday 23 May 2011 12:23:02 schrieb Marco van de Voort:
> > In our previous episode, Rainer Stratmann said:
> > > > package systems "should" bring them in if they are missing.
> > > >
> > > > And the qtintf library is mostly likely not available.
> > >
> > > Would it be possible to put all the needed libraries in on
> > > ~/fpc_install_xxx directory with all other programs so that lazarus looks
> > > there first for the libraries?
> >
> > Not without system reconfiguration so that the system searched for libs
> > there, and getting this fault-free is near impossible.
> Also because of the design of lazarus.

FPC has some dependencies too. For example binutils. And to develop you
almost always need some more tools and development libraries.


> Instead of emulating win32 api on every other system it would be better to 
> emulate for example fpGUI on win32.

Huh? Either my English is not good enough or you have no idea what you
are talking about.

 
> > The only solution is to not do that and link everything that is potentially
> > a risk into one big binary. Commercial vendors.
> Also a very good solution would be to not rely on the many different libs.

One is enough to get the hassle.
Linux comes in many flavors and FPC and Lazarus support that. And
IMO both are good things.

 
> > But they often only support one or two distributions formally.
> Solution see above.
> 
> > In general, this IMHO is a dead end. Many have tried, and many have failed.
> > Even if it works, the maintenance effort is even more killing than the
> > current situation, since you are totally on your own.
> No that's not true.
> Look at fpGUI and MSEgui.
> The programmers of these applications are experts in what they are doing.
> These are working examples how to come to independency.
> And also I think the maintenance is very easy since then there are less 
> dependencies to the libs. That means less complications.

msegui is already split into three debian packages. This is the
situation of Lazarus several years ago and of FPC a decade ago. Then
package maintainers split the packages into more and more independent
chunks.
FPC and Laz supports many third party libraries. 
Of course there people who don't care for this, so they ask for the
base set of FPC and Laz with minimum requirements. Other users need a
third party library. And that's why FPC and Lazarus were split into
many packages on Debian.
So actually, what you think is complicated, is the answer to the many
different requests.

In the end the solution is always a compromise of time and skills of
volunteers.
If you want to volunteer then the FPC and Lazarus team will support you.

Mattias