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

[Bo Berglund]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2011 15:03:23 +0200, Juha Manninen
<juha.manninen62 at gmail.com> wrote:

>* What should be done: *
>
>- First, concentrate on the page structure. For example installing Lazarus and 
>installing FPC are 2 different things and they should be documented as such.
>A link for installation should be on the main wiki page (as you noted).
>The following installation page should have links for different platforms, 
>separately for Lazarus and FPC, and for different install methods.
>There will be many pages and some information must be duplicated, but it is 
>still better than one big messy page.

Yes, this would be a boon if done.

>- Easy things should be documented as being easy. For example installing 
>Lazarus trunk from SVN using an existing FPC is EASY. For Linux :
>
>$ cd ~
>$ svn co http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/lazarus/trunk lazarus
>$ cd lazarus
>$ make all
>$ ./lazarus &

"make all" executed on the command line presupposes that the *correct*
version of make is on path, which is not always the case...
I encountered this and had a hard time understanding what was going
on. Turned out I had a make.exe before the fpc one because I had
installed BDS 2006 on my PC. And this make is totally unsuited for FPC
work...

>For Windows it is about as easy.
>However that is not obvious from the current wiki page.

On Windows (where I am) I found that the best way to compile lazarus
was to make a simple batch file where the path is modified to point to
the correct FPC binary. This way it does not matter how other installs
have messed up the path variable. On my Windows boxes path is horrible
after installing a few scores of programs and utilities. They all seem
to want to add themselves to path even though it typically is not
needed. And they put themselves at the beginning or end with no
systematic reason too. And finally, when uninstalling some utilities
they do not bother removing themselves from path either. :-(

My batch file looks like this:

@echo off
echo This will build lazarus 0_9_30_fixes branch with FPC 2.4.2
echo If this is not OK then use ctrl-c to exit.
pause
set PATH=C:\Programs\lazarus\fpc\2.4.2\bin\i386-win32
make.exe clean all
pause

>
>- Concentrate on the essential. For example installing and using TortoiseSVN 
>should NOT be documented at the same page with Lazarus installation 
>(naturally).

I believe that someone who has not used SVN but need it in order to
get the sources should really be adviced to install the command line
SVN, because TSVN is really very confusing and invades the Windows
Explorer no end.
I did both so now I have my Explorer messed up, but I have not once
gotten anything to work with TSVN. OTOH installing command line SVN
was easy and after that making the one line command to retrieve the
sources was real simple too. Recommended!
But please put a few links on the wiki page showing where to get the
SVN client! There seems to be a whole lot of such floating around and
it is very confusing for a SVNebie....



-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden