[lazarus] external codetools / copycat equality

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002 18:37:31 +0100
Marc Weustink <marc at dommelstein.net> wrote:

> IMO every project should be able to compile with or wihout IDE.

Just a side note:

There will probably no one, that will doubt this statement, because it sounds very principally.
But (There is always a But :)

Take for example lazarus itself. You can compile it without the Makefiles. 12 lines with a lot of parameters: cd .. && ppc386 .. && cd .. && ppc386 && remove ..
Therefore people invented 'make' and hence you can build lazarus with 'make' (at least, if you got 1.0.6).

The same holds true for the auto-created-units.
A single auto-created-unit can be built by invoking a command line tool (e.g. h2pas, lazres).
Together with make you can build a Makefile to do the update checking and invoking the tool to build the auto-created-unit. So, strictly speaking, we already have the tool that is discussed ('make').

We intend to create an update-and-auto-creator (Matjaz called it preprocessor) to simplify the update of auto-created-units. If this thing is integrated in the IDE we gain the advantages of caching, perhaps updating in memory and of course inner program communication, which is always simpler than the command line. And if the user wants to compile his project manually, the IDE could create a Makefile.fpc. This feature is always a good idea, so we will eventually implement it anyway.

What I'm trying to say is: Even if the update check is not a command line tool, but solely integrated in the IDE, this is no disadvantage. You will be able to compile it without the IDE, but it can be more difficult, just as if you are not using make.


Mattias