[Lazarus] Help on FCL?

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Marco van de Voort wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 07:52:04PM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>>>> blessed with variable network latency. And it's absolutely no substitute 
>>>> for the context-sensitive help offered by most IDEs.
>>> Lazarus and the textmode IDE both provide context sensitive help. (CHM
>>> based)
>> Right. So as I said earlier: where's the idiot's guide to getting the 
>> up-to-date files and putting them where they'll do most good,
> 
> The readme in the relevant docs-chm archive?

Look, I'm not trying to be a pain in the butt here but in front of me 
I've got Lazarus 0.9.31. I go to the menu and hit "Help": it fires up a 
browser and takes me to online help. Nowhere there does it say anything 
about docs-chm.

I hit F1 over a reserved word, it brings up a dialogue complaining about 
a missing file. Nowhere there does it say anything about docs-chm.

I usually build Lazarus from source, downloading from svn. Nowhere there 
does it say anything about docs-chm, or it certainly said nothing when I 
started working like that four or five years ago.

So I go to http://www.freepascal.org/ and there's online documentation, 
or PDFs etc. Nothing to integrate with Lazarus.

So I go to http://lazarus.freepascal.org/. There's no online 
documentation. So I go to the bottom of the downloads page... and so on.

Now it's pretty clear that people /are/ working on documentation etc., 
but it's also pretty clear that Lazarus is perceived as not being 
well-documented- and that's to its detriment. Noting Marco's

 > The current situation is a result of competing help formats. This made
 > developers wary of choosing one over the other as "default" format.

but with respect to everybody I think that the project is being harmed 
by its perceived lack of documentation, and getting /something/ useful 
to appear when a naive user expects it is going to be far more useful 
than having every last detail of layout and hypertextual linkage sorted 
to perfection.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]