[Lazarus] Wiki instructions for installing FPC trunk

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Mattias Gaertner wrote:

>> There are many ways to compile and install FPC. You can use plain make (see 
>> below), but it is recommended to build a fpc package for your distribution 
>> (.deb or .rpm file). A fpc package allows to easily uninstall, upgrade and 
>> downgrade it and a package makes sure that all files are installed at the 
>> common places. So if something goes wrong, other users know how to help you.

If something goes wrong with installation from a .deb or .rpm, then 
users of Debian/Ubuntu or Red Hat might know how to help you, but it 
does not necessarily make things easier for FPC or Lazarus developers.

If the distro were guaranteed to be stable for a few years that would 
justify the project developers familiarising themselves with it, or if 
the project was stable that would make things easy for the distro 
managers. Unfortunately neither of those is the case.

My solution is to let the distro (in my case Debian) manage libraries, 
middleware and "capital apps" like Mozilla and Open Office, recognising 
that they're going to be a long way behind the "bleeding edge". In 
general I've found compiling and installing FPC and Lazarus on top of 
those to be not too difficult, with the possible exception of things 
like FPC's relationship with libgdb, Lazarus's relationship with libc, 
and the ABI to EABI transition on ARM.

With the major caveat that if you want to build a particular version of 
Lazarus you need to know its preferred version of FPC, and if you need 
to build a particular version of FPC you might, in my experience, need a 
pre-existing binary from one release older (don't expect to build 2.4.0 
using the 2.0.0 compiler).

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]