[Lazarus] Building help files: the nitty-gritty

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 27 July 2012 14:05, Mark Morgan Lloyd
> <markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
>> Strongly agreed. The ONLY case in which these might be applicable is when
> 
> 
> The reasoning for recommending Kylix Help to Lazarus users was simple.
> Only in the last year or so did the Lazarus LCL actually start getting
> help. Not to mention that Lazarus didn't even have a offline help
> system to compete with anything out there.  I still feel to this day,
> the Kylix Help is still a lot more complete, detailed and useful, with
> working example code too.

It's also copyright, and you were very quick to point out the 
questionable status of somebody's contribution earlier in the day.

However I agree that Lazarus and FPC help still has some way to go.

> As for the x86 Linux only comment.... Well, tough sh*t to the Windows
> and Mac users. I paid for Kylix Enterprise, so why the hell may I not
> reuse what I paid a fortune for!  In any case, LCL is supposed to be a
> VCL clone (just like CLX), so the Delphi/Kylix help should be very
> appropriate to LCL - if not, then the Lazarus project didn't do a very
> good job cloning Delphi VCL.

You miss my point. The proprietary viewer is NBG on Linux running on 
ARM, MIPS, PPC, SPARC and so on. And it's NBG for Solaris and BSD on any 
CPU. Not to mention Windows, OS X, or minority operating systems such as 
OS/2.

So while I agree wholeheartedly that you (or anybody else who's paid for 
Kylix, and arguably anybody who's been given a legitimate free copy) 
should be able to use the help files even as an aid to migrating to 
another development environment, I don't think it's appropriate for them 
to be recommended for use in other contexts.

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

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