[Lazarus] Installing lazarus on Windows, horror story goes on

[Andrew Brunner]

2010/7/29 Juha Manninen <juha.manninen62 at gmail.com>:
> 2010/7/29 Andrew Brunner <andrew.t.brunner at gmail.com>

> You understood the situation little wrong. He is not planning to write SW,
> he only wants to build and run the program I made, on his platform (OSX)
> which is different from mine (Linux).
> Remember the ad: Write once, compile everywhere.

It does change my opinion a bit.  Hmm...  I switch between
Linux/Mac/Win7 daily with no problems.  I use FPC and Lazarus from SVN
with no problems.

> Actually it is me pushing this Lazarus thing for him. He asked me earlier if
> a computer program could solve his problem. I became interested and promised
> to write a small prog. I really thought Lazarus was a good idea because he
> could build a Mac version with it. Later the Windows laptop was just a
> rescue plan when everything failed.
> I am not going to ask money from him, this is more a question of pride now.
> I don't want to push crap to anyone.

There is no way Lazarus/FPC will end up being crap.  If there is an
issue it's most likely something the dev community has not encountered
or a problem that they will end up telling you/him to fix.


>> Software development requires a basic understanding of how computers
>> work...
>
> I understand that. Still, Lazarus should be easy to install also for people
> who don't program themselves!
> In a sense it is comparable to Java if the purpose really is to compile
> existing code for other platforms.
>
>  I really don't know what went wrong. The fact is however that something
> went wrong for a person who can install most other SW. It means the
> installation is not as easy as it should be.
>
> BTW, do you think my idea of compiling a program using Lazarus by a
> non-programmer is a stupid idea? I honestly thought it was a cool idea.
> But, maybe Lazarus should be touched only by programmers and it kind of
> justifies the difficult installation. It works as an intelligence test. If
> you can't install it, you are too stupid to program.
>
>
Well Juha, you certainly raise an interesting issue.  I think that
requiring FPC/Lazarus to build an open source project is understood.
I do think that having an understanding of OS permissions/issues
common to specific deployment platforms is a core requirement.  I do
think that FPC/Lazarus is far to complicated for this relatively small
group of developers to anticipate localized problems with operating
systems and end-users to focus on issues that can be solved -
trivially - by someone who has experience (remotely or directly) with
the target platform to get around non-developmental problems such as
the ones you are describing.

That being said I have personally encountered problems with install
Linux specifically that the make scripts could have handled but I was
forced to.  It was with multiple instances of FPC.  I had to re-route
symbolic links - but I was able to get past those issues once I was
familiar with FPC AND LINUX.

I've personally never had file permission problems on XP only b/c XP
has limited security options and only with NTFS deployed.

It's interesting for me, to hear of your issue but I can assure you
that what ever the problem is - it's only b/c a user did something
that wasn't anticipated by the install scripts/batch/program and not
an issue with the Development of Lazarus or FPC as it pertains to core
development.  And if it can be avoided - you will see it will be
resolved - but you have to reproduce the issue - which I suspect you
can't.

WOW.  Good luck with this.  Can't you just give him the Binary for him
to place in his applications folder?  Then, zip the source for his
entertainment?