[Lazarus] TProcess, UTF8, Windows

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Jürgen Hestermann schrieb:

> When I use a function that I used before (in Turbo Pascal, Virtual Pascal,
> Delphi) but now want to use with Free Pascal (Lazarus) then the first
> thing is to google for it.

Have you ever opened the FPDoc Editor window? In the trunk version the 
available documentation also is displayed in a hint window, when moving 
the mouse over source code.

> For CopyFile I find a link to the documentation
> but it only says:
> 
> -----------------------------------
> const SrcFilename: String;
> const DestFilename: String
> 
> SrcFilename    The source filename for the Copy
> DestFilename   The destination filename for the Copy
> -----------------------------------
> 
> String is generic so it can be pchar, shortstring or ansistring or ....
> But what is the encoding? It does not tell me. If the parameter I want
> to feed in comes from a different source (database, file, ...) where I
> know the encoding how do I find out to which encoding it has to be
> converted to?

The documentation definitely is in a bad state. I already tried to 
improve it, adding questions about omissions etc. which I couldn't 
answer myself. But it turned out that the Lazarus team is not willing to 
provide the missing information, so I stopped any further updates. As 
the only "improvement" a Notes section has been added to every 
documentation entry, where questions and rants can be added. But this 
new section is not visible nor editable in LazDE nor FPDocEditor, is not 
included in the final documentation (by default). So it also will stay a 
hidden and ignored Hall of Shame :-(

DoDi