[Lazarus] following wiki for new clean install from SVN...

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

waldo kitty wrote:
> ok, so i decided to break things today and see what problems i would run 
> into... the following is my steps and what i ran into...
[...]
> thanks for reading... i hope this one wasn't off topic or otherwise 
> undesired as so many of my past posts seemingly have been...

My own feeling is that this suggests that you're trying to run before 
walking. As another user with limited experience, I generally make a 
point of starting off with a binary installation of the most recent 
stable FPC (currentlu 2.4.2) which in most cases creates fpc.cfg etc. 
without problems, usually then checking that it can compile itself so 
that I know that I've also got a good set of sources which I copy to 
/usr/lib/fpc/xxx/fpcsrc.

I then use svn to install a set of fairly-recent but not bleeding-edge 
Lazarus sources, e.g. fixes_0_9_30 which should build (i.e.  make all 
or  make bigide) without error. When starting, I tell the IDE that the 
sources are in /usr/lib/fpc/xxx/fpcsrc, and then if there are multiple 
versions involved I use --PCP= so that each copy of Lazarus knows where 
to find the matching copy of FPC. Note that the Lazarus IDE tries to use 
the version of FPC it finds in the path, it doesn't record the version 
it's compiled with internally (which I think is unfortunate).

As somebody who is still finding his feet in the twin projects, there 
are possibly only one or two occasions where I have had to run a 
development version of the compiler, and that has normally only been 
when one of the developers has specifically told me to because of a 
recent fix.

HOWEVER, what I think this illustrates is that somebody who's got a bit 
of experience with Linux is in a far stronger position when it comes to 
using other OSes including Windows.

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

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