[fpc-pascal] Compile errors

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Thu, 23 Jan 2025, Frank McCormick via fpc-pascal wrote:

>> 
>> Strange. I know someone who uses ocrt on OpenSuse since years. Maybe he 
>> is still on an older version of OpenSuse.
>> 
>> I now tested 10 of the provided demos and on my linux mint they all start
>> without problem.
>> 
>
>    This is weird. This morning I installed FPC into my Debian Trixie 
> installation on another partition.
> I successfully compiled and ran all the demo programs !!
>
> It seems FPC on my OpenSuse installation is broken somehow.
> I have removed FPC and installed it directly from the RPM downloads
> on the Free Pascal site and it suffered the same problems.
> I then re-installed the OpenSuse Tumbleweed version
> and suffered exactly the same problem.
> I will try asking on the OpenSuse Tumbleweed mailing list, but
> I fear there are not many (if any) people using Pascal there.

The problem is a mismatch between the fpc import units and the libraries
installed. A fpc import unit such as ncurses (ocrt,ncrt) describes all the
functions and types in a library. It follows that if the library no longer
offers these functions, the unit is no longer correct and linking will fail
(as you observed).

The conclusion is that opensuse ships different ncurses libraries than debian, 
and the fpc units describe the units as found on debian. Up till a certain version
of opensuse they were probably identical (because I know someone who has
been using it for almost 20 years on OpenSuSE), but now they differ.

It may be that the functions previously found in the ncurses library are 
now simply in another library, the question then becomes 'which one ?'

Michael.