[Lazarus] Compiling LCL units via commandline

[Paul Breneman]

Hi,

You wrote:
 > Under certain point of view, our project has an educational focus.
 > Blind programers with few or any experience is our public. If the
 > first contact with Pascal is complex, people can give up.

I've been working on a Free Pascal educational project for more than 
four and a half years (it still remains more of a collection of pieces 
rather than something a new user could start with):
   http://www.turbocontrol.com/monitor.htm

This wiki page has a little overview from the perspective of an embedded 
system programmer:
   http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_Embedded_Nutshell

The project should help provide an easy first contact as shown on this 
page (there are new tutorials for Win32 users):
   http://www.turbocontrol.com/helloworld.htm

The Raspberry Pi is made for educational use and is probably going down 
in history as the platform that brings many new users to Linux.  I'm 
hoping to help a lot of those folks to consider using Free Pascal.  I 
hope to soon add Python (and maybe other language) versions of a few of 
the projects so a new user can try different things.

If there are things I can tweak to help you or other blind programmers 
please contact me.  For my direct email go to my home page (below my 
name below) and use the mailto link and use "office" as the user name.

Regards,
Paul

www.TurboControl.com


luciano de souza wrote:
> Hello listers,
> 
> I am blind and I use Freepascal by means of a screen reader. Recently,
> I and other four blind programers wanted to compile a project which
> implies the usage of LCL units. The very reduced accessiblity of
> Lazarus environment make us to decide to compile everything via FPC.
> 
> fpc project.pp
> 
> Under FPC, it doesn't compile. In spite of the fact FPC is inside the
> Lazarus, it does not configured to search for LCL units. So we add in
> fpc.cfg:
> 
> -FuC:\lazarus\components
> -FuC:\lazarus\components\*
> -FUC:\lazarus\lcl
> -FUC:\lazarus\lcl\*
> -FiC:\lazarus\lcl\include
> -FuC:\lazarus\units
> -FuC:\lazarus\units\*
> 
> The paths were found, but there is a circular reference between
> messages and lmessages.
> 
> Having reported it in a forum, I member told me about lazbuild. I
> should manually create a XML file with the project settings and try to
> compile again. The same error about circular reference is raised.
> 
> Yes, Lazbuild can be used. But I confess this option strongliy upset
> me. Lazbuild calls several routines and after all calls FPC. If you
> imagine the screen reader reads all the output, not having a way to
> jump the unneeded information, you will evaluate how slow can be the
> compilation using Lazbuild. The output of FPC is not so verbose, so
> it's prefferable to use FPC without Lazbuild.
> 
> I tried to compile the following example program:
> 
> program e026;
> {$mode objfpc}{$H+}
> 
> uses
> interfaces, dialogs;
> 
> BEGIN
> END.
> 
> Under certain point of view, our project has an educational focus.
> Blind programers with few or any experience is our public. If the
> first contact with Pascal is complex, people can give up. And the
> first contact, according this project, implies the usage of LCL. There
> is a Pascal voice system called Dosvox writen in Pascal. It offers a
> good set of units for developers. Let me give you an example: the crt
> unit was converted into dvcrt unit and syntwriteln in place of only
> show a message, can also speak it.
> 
> My conclusion is: I need LCL, but how to compile any code using only
> Freepascal? How can I configure my fpc.cfg to search for any unit in
> Lazarus folders and compile any type of project? Console? Graphical?
> 
> And to avoid this work, I suggest the standard distribution of Lazarus
> includes an FPC configured to compile everything.
> The ideal would be to do all in the Lazarus interface, but it's
> impossible. Among other reasons, the label of widgets produced by LCL
> can't be read by screen readers. But it's subject for another message!
> 
> Regards,
>