[Lazarus] Lazarus installation on Mac plus other thoughts

[Cox, Stuart TRAN:EX]

As a matter of interest, are you using some form of the Bin Packing or
Knapsack algorithms to underpin your woodworking program?

Stu Cox
Project Management Technician
Southern Interior Region
Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure
342-447 Columbia St.,
Kamloops, BC V2C 2T3
p: 250-828-4320
f: 250-828-4229
stuart.cox at gov.bc.ca
-----Original Message-----
From: Juha Manninen [mailto:juha.manninen62 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 6:50 AM
To: lazarus at lists.lazarus.freepascal.org
Subject: [Lazarus] Lazarus installation on Mac plus other thoughts

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.

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

---

About the program I made:
My friend, instead of being a geek, is a talented construction worker.
He has 
a pile of wood boards (the traditional meaning, sawed slices of wood),
which 
he can measure in advance.
He must choose a set of them to make a desired length and then saw away
the 
leftover piece.
My program takes the desired length and the lengths of available boards
and 
chooses the best combination so that the leftover is minimal. This has
been a 
problem always in construction work but there is no SW solution
available, 
according to my friend.

If "n" is the number of available boards then there are 2 ^ n
combinations to 
make, the same as "1" bits in a binary number of "n" digits.
Boy, the current computers are fast. The data is only a short integer
array 
which easily fits into processor cache. Then integer arithmetic and some
bit 
shifting. For example 25 boards (2 ^ 25 = 33 554 432 combinations) is 
calculated in ~ 2 secs on a mini-laptop. I haven't even make any obvious

optimizations yet.

Juha

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