[Lazarus] Lazarus installation on Mac plus other thoughts

[Marcos Douglas]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Juha Manninen
<juha.manninen62 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have just witnessed how difficult installing Lazarus on Apple Mac can be,
> although I think the same applies to other operating systems, too.
> I made a program for my friend using Lazarus. He has a modern Mac but he
> mostly just browses Internet and writes e-mails and talks with Skype and
> doesn't care about the technical details. His English skills are poor.
> In essence he is not a geek.
>
> We had a Skype line open and he tried to install Lazarus and FPC. I felt like
> trying to drive a car with eyes folded. He didn't know even the basic things
> like using a command line. We wasted like 3 hours fighting with the
> installation and it still didn't work! Both Lazarus and FPC were installed but
> always gave errors.
> Later I realized the wiki page tells you to install "Apple Developer tools". I
> didn't realize it then.
>
> Now a question for Mac people: should we proceed with the newly found
> instructions for Mac or should we use a Windows laptop which he can borrow?
> At least I have installed Lazarus on Windows and could help him.
> Are there some traps to look at when installing for Mac?
>
> Now a more generic thought :
> * Easy installation is more important than the core developers may understand.
> The typical claim is that if you are clever enough to program, you must be
> clever enough to install FPC and Lazarus somehow.
> No! For example my friend is not interested in programming but still he needs
> Lazarus to build the program I made. I can't compile a binary for him because
> I don't have a Mac. Cross-compiling for Mac is beyond my skills.
>
> Otherwise Lazarus is so easy to use for anyone. You add some controls to a
> form and click the green arrow, like in a media player, and the program
> compiles and runs. There is much complexity behind the scenes to make this
> happen.
> Something should be done for the installation in general. It should be more
> automatic like for most other programs. Now a good Linux distro seems to be
> the easiest platform for installation. The package manager takes care of FPC
> dependency when installing Lazarus.

You are completly right!

> Me and Marcos Douglas have recently improved the installation wiki pages a
> little but that is not enough.

...and we will improved even more.


MD