[Lazarus] Building help files: the nitty-gritty

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 08:47:20 +0000
Mark Morgan Lloyd <markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:

> Mattias Gaertner wrote:
> > On Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:45:46 +0000
> > Mark Morgan Lloyd <markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
> > 
> >> [...]
> >>> make bigide does not include chmhelppkg. You have to pass
> >>> OPT=-dUseCHMHelp to do that.
> >> I made using bigide, and the package was in the installed list.
> > 
> > See ide/lazarus.pp
> > Maybe you are confusing "installed" lists?
> 
> I mean in the sense of the "If you are using Lazarus from Subversion" in 
> the 
> http://wiki.freepascal.org/Installing_Help_in_the_IDE#Installing_CHM_Help_for_The_RTL.2C_FCL_and_LCL_in_the_Lazarus_IDE 
> page which is cited by the trunk IDE's Help -> Online Help page: the 
> instructions are accurate (it's only page and link organisation that 
> I've been querying).

It is true that the chmhelppkg was included with some binaries and
therefore many users had it preinstalled. But afaik it was never
enabled by default in target bigide. 

Try this:
make clean bigide
./lazarus --pcp=testconfig

 
> >> I still had to build lhelp manually.
> > 
> > Check if you have local modifications. In trunk the makefile target
> > bigide includes lhelp.
> 
> Same applies.

If you don't have a components/chmhelp/lhelp/lhelp after doing a "make
bigide", then please report the bug.

 
> >>> The docs have references to the RTL+FCL docs, which are outside the
> >>> Lazarus sources and have references to programmers guide, which
> >>> requires latex. The whole doc build chain has too many dependencies and
> >>> need several minutes to build. That's not feasible for a simple make
> >>> command.
> >> So what's best to do here: download them as binaries and install where/how?
> > 
> > Download the chm files and put them into "yourlazarus/docs/chm/".
> 
> OK, so I get 
> ftp://freepascal.stack.nl/pub/fpc/dist/2.6.0/docs/doc-chm.zip and 
> unpack. The .txt file says copy the files to docs/html which I'm 
> assuming is wrong, so I end up with .chm (etc.) files in 
> /usr/local/share/lazarus-trunk/docs/chm and the Lazarus IDE picks them 
> up automatically.

Yes, the paths are a little bit confusing.

Historically the default search path for chm files was docs/html. But
this is a source directory. Mixing svn files and downloaded files is
confusing. It is cleaner to put all downloaded files into a directory if
its own (docs/chm).
The docs/html directory is still in the search path for
compatibility.

 
> Congratulations and thanks to everybody who's worked hard to get the IDE 
> to this point (and who's put up with my occasionally bull-headed questions).

:)

Mattias