[Lazarus] Help on FCL?

[Marco van de Voort]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 11:32:13PM +0200, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> > Why not simply use the CHM help?
> 
> I think what he meant was, having the ability of reusing the Kylix
> help files, while Lazarus seriously lacks good / any documentation for
> the LCL.

Maybe. But this should not be recommended. It is escapism (and of legal
uncertainty).

And certainly it is crazy to start developing to support that heavily aging
mess.

> At least the Kylix 3 help is easily obtained in a legal manner.

How so? Is it licensed for use without Kylix at all then?

Moreover, IMHO 3rd party devels doing this is their business, but IMHO
FPC/Lazarus shouldn't be recommending this kind of stuff (and IMHO the wiki
article should disappear)

> And
> seeing that Lazarus's goal is to be a clone of Delphi VCL, this could work
> in a pinch.

IMHO it is a step backwards.
 
> In the case of Delphi 7 help, there is no "Open Edition" of Delphi,
> and the Delphi help was in WinHelp format, not CHM.

Afaik CHMs for all recent versions are on the FTP server, the question, as
with Kylix is their doubtful legal status.

Same problem, individual people doing it is probably not a problem, but IMHO
the Lazarus/FPC projects should not be advocating this. Specially not when
they formally have cleanroom policies in place.

>  And as far as I
> know, Lazarus doesn't support WinHelp format, but maybe a similar
> trick can be applied as was done for HyperHelp.

Winhelp is RTF based.

> But to be honest, there are so many incompatibilities and differing
> behaviours between Delphi and Lazarus, that I don't really know how
> useful the VCL or CLX help will be. Reading the recent message
> threads, it seems they can't even agree how to compile and package the
> little LCL help content that is there.

It still gets the primary gist. But I prefer to get such info from public
sources on the internet, and not directly from Embarcadero sources.