[Lazarus] Lazarus trunk help options: CHM Help browser does not show up

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Marco van de Voort schrieb:

>>> If you think it should, please annotate such things in the wiki.  :-)
>> What do you expect me to annotate? That I'm missing a documentation of 
>> the options, which the user can add on a "make" commandline?
> 
> Yes. If you find something out (e.g. by inspection makefiles), and think if
> that is important, document it somewhere. I've been doing that for years
> with the buildfaq.

The MakeFile (like most others) is unreadable to me. It includes help 
only for the supported targets, nothing else.



> IOW the project state should be separated in a system dependent (user
> settings and preferences and paths), and a system independent part (which
> sources and XMLs contribute to the patches, parameterised with macros in a
> few rare cases)

I mentioned that already, after my first experiments with the new projects.


> But those are the minor ones. The make system which seems to hit the commandline limit of
> the shell (8192) are the problem immediate problem.

The bulk text can be moved into text files, usable with --input and --descr.


> Then, the platform dependence of doc making (though IMHO we should do per
> platform docs. Just fixate to a platform, and then try to improve the docs
> with little building improvements. (e.g. exclude lists for very linux
> specific topics, better annotation of what is platform specific etc)

FPDoc has no special features for platform-specific docs. I don't see 
any need for that, unless somebody finds out how it could be made work 
in a *cross-compiler* environment, or for *online help* residing on some 
server, for users of any platform. Consider e.g. the handling and 
representation of the line numbers for the declarations - what if these 
vary across targets?

Until then it's mandatory to have *all* units documented in the final 
docs, regardless of their availability on a certain platform. Eventual 
platform restrictions have to go literally into the docs. Context 
sensitive help will be invoked only for topics available in the 
currently *selected* target, so that excess documentation will not be 
seen by the user. Support for platform-specific selection of the topics 
only can be built into the viewer (if ever), not into the doc generators.

> Adding another (platform) dimension to docs building will only decrease, not
> increare the quality of the docs IMHO. _AND_ the ease of building them.

ACK.

DoDi