[fpc-pascal] Docs - structural change

[Marco van de Voort]

Op 10-9-2026 om 20:40 schreef Tomas Hajny via fpc-pascal:
>
>
> More importantly - we're about to release 3.2.4 _and_ redesign the WWW 
> site. However, the link provided in the IDE will stop working after 
> the WWW site redesign.

The IDE says here:

-----

  To keep the size of the FPC download reasonably low, the CHM help files
  which are necessary for the IDE help to function, are omitted.
  To get these docs, go to https://www.freepascal.org/down/docs/docs.var 
and get
  doc-chm.zip
  for your version. Extract the CHM files and add them to the IDE using 
Help|Files.
  ------

Afaik rc2 is the same.

>   I guess we should still fix it for the final release in this case? 
> @Michael? I know that this isn't a regression in RC2, but it is 
> something that we should probably take care of in the context of the 
> WWW site redesign (together with updating the links in the readme.txt 
> and FAQ files which are both also distributed with the release)?
>
Yes. Update as much as possible. Don't mention things that haven't been 
tested for decade.

>
> Very true - it wouldn't work on anything without LFN support, and 
> extracting and especially indexing the help in this format takes 
> forever. I tested it under Win32. But that wasn't my point - the HTML 
> format should either stay supported, or get documented and announced 
> as not supported any longer rather than breaking the support silently 
> (which fortunately didn't happen, but I wasn't sure about that 
> originally and thus asked).

And my point is that if it isn't actively supported, remove it from 
documentation for now, even if you don't remove the support.

>> I can't deprecate the rest, but IMHO the fact that there is zero 
>> feedback on them in about a decade says IMHO says enough.
>
> Out of curiousity - how much feedback did you get about the CHM files 
> recently? 

CHM ide, one or two per year. CHM in general, about 8-10.

> Isn't it more because most people use Lazarus or other editors rather 
> than the text mode IDE? 

Yes. Lately people seem to slowly discover CHM as doxygen backend. There 
are even post rc2 fixes.

> Obviously, that doesn't mean that we should stop supporting the IDE, 
> just that the amount of feedback to the help format in IDE may not be 
> directly specifically related to the format. 

I keep those apart. But one an year is still more than none in a decade.