[Lazarus] multiple versions and portable lazarus

[Roberto Padovani]

2011/5/31 Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl>:
> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 09:34:23PM +0200, Roberto Padovani wrote:
>> I know it's me, and I beg your pardon for this, but every time I try
>> to upgrade from a lazarus version to another...it's a mess.
>> It happened before, but today I tried to upgrade from 0.9.28.3 to
>> 0.9.30 stable releases
>
> Don't upgrade. Carefully erase (everything!), and then reinstall.
>
>> Uninstalling old versions, always leaves something behind. For example
>> I had some packages of mine installed in the old one, and the new one
>> complained it couldn't find the package file (so it created a dummy
>> one)
>
> I do agree that installers should ask if the old config should be reused.
> They seem to be versioned, so that should be possible.
>
>> It seems to me that I cannot uninstall completely.
>
> Simply kill ~/.lazarus on *nix and -alikes, and lazarus dirs in your profile on windows.
> No need for drama.

Sorry for the poor english. The problem with winsdoz is that "lazarus
dirs in your profile" seems to mean a lot of different things in
different computers

>
>> Generally speaking, why do I have to _install_ (in the win32 sense)
>> lazarus?
>
> I guess to preconfigure the configuration. In short to seed e.g. the FPC
> source directory the installer just installed.
>
>> Isn't it possible to have a portable installation?
>
> To some degree yes. There are possibilities, and 0.9.30 should be again a bit
> more capable than earlier.
>
> The most important bits are -pcp=  (that sets the configuration directory)
> and --lazarus-dir that sets the main lazarus dir. Then the some paths should
> be initialized relative to these paths, and then some script should devise
> where it is started and pass this info to lazarus using -pcp and
>  --lazarus-dir
>
>> If I compile it from scratch, set a few environment options and
>> register some extension, should it work?
>
> Environment options? There are no environment options. By default Lazarus
> searches its config in the user profile. If it is not there, it initialize
> an empty, but non functional one.
>
>> The same is true for FPC, can it be portable?
>
> Standalone FPC works slightly differently. It searches for (roughly)
> /etc/fpc.cfg or ~/.fpc.cfg and that file should contain mainly the path to
>  the RTL and other precompiled units.
>
> Lazarus overrides that by generating and passing an own fpc.cfg. Not unlike
> Delphi with dcc32.cfg btw. The info for that comes from Lazarus' own
> configuration.
>
>

hmm... I'll try to make it portable, starting from the sources.
But maybe a precompiled binary for win32 with a little utility (like a
cheklist) to setup those cfg will be of help to many.

Thanks,

  Roberto


>
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