[Lazarus] Fwd: How to change default editor font *before* primary config ~/.lazarus is created?

[Bernd]

2012/10/17 Mattias Gaertner <nc-gaertnma at netcologne.de>:

> True. But Lazarus and fpc easily need one or two GB, so 45MB is not that much.
> And it is some kind of show stopper if the IDE recompiles everything to install
> one package.
> Of course the binary will be smaller and some users have slow internet.
> So it has pros and cons. I can live with it.

Yesterday after doing more rigorous attempts to remove *all* binaries
from the install directory (so that contents of /usr/share/ becomes
truly architecture independent which is a *must* and the very
definition and purpose of /usr/share/) I noticed that this gives some
more subtle problems, when restarting the IDE after successful rebuild
of the IDE it will look for startlazarus in the lazarus folder (and
not on the search path). Therefore I have for now decided to install
the entire lazarus into /usr/lib/lazarus and leave the executables it
is looking for where they are.

This would make it possible to leave also the compiled units in the
lazarus folder again (but of course only makes sense if I don't
compile them with custom options). In the end this is only a change of
one line in the rues file and does not break other things and it is
nice to know that it is at least possible to make such a stripped down
installer that still provides a fully functional Lazarus.

> I'm not sure I can follow you here. How can I reproduce the bug?

It is because of the typical directory layout when building a .deb
package. I will try to explain. Consider this simple hello world
directory layout after unzipping and preparing the source for package
building immediately before the actual build is started:

hello-world-1.0/debian/changelog
hello-world-1.0/debian/control
hello-world-1.0/debian/rules
hello-world-1.0/Makefile
hello-world-1.0/hello.lpi
hello-world-1.0/hello.lpr

after "make all" it might look like this:

hello-world-1.0/debian/changelog
hello-world-1.0/debian/control
hello-world-1.0/debian/rules
hello-world-1.0/Makefile
hello-world-1.0/hello.lpi
hello-world-1.0/hello.lpr
hello-world-1.0/hello.ppu
hello-world-1.0/hello.o
hello-world-1.0/hello

now it will call "make install" with PREFIX set to a special path that
it will later use to zip the installation contents. This PREFIX folder
is a subdirectory of the debian folder!

Our example makefile (just for illustration purpose) would for example
install into $(PREFIX)/lib/hello and also a symlink into $(PREFIX)/bin
so after make install it should look like this:

hello-world-1.0/debian/hello-world/usr/lib/hello/hello
hello-world-1.0/debian/hello-world/usr/bin/hello  -> ../lib/hello/hello
hello-world-1.0/debian/changelog
hello-world-1.0/debian/control
hello-world-1.0/debian/rules
hello-world-1.0/Makefile
hello-world-1.0/hello.lpi
hello-world-1.0/hello.lpr
hello-world-1.0/hello.ppu
hello-world-1.0/hello.o
hello-world-1.0/hello

then after make install has completed debhelper tools will zip
everything below debian/hello-world/ and make it the data.tar.gz
member of the .deb

the reason why "make install" of lazarus fails is that at one point it does a

cp -r . $(PREFIX)/share/lazarus/

and with prefix set to ./debian/lazarus/usr this will expand like that:

cp -r . ./debian/lazarus/usr/share/lazarus/

which would attempt to copy the entire folder (*including* the debian
folder!) into a subdirectory of itself (into the debian folder) and
this will fail with error, cp will refuse to do this, it will start
copying a few files but then when it comes to copying the ./debian
folder into ./debian/lazarus/usr/share/lazarus/ it will abort with
error.

this can be avoided by either copying only the needed files
explicitly. I worked around this by installing into a temp dir
*outside* the current directory and then in a separate step moving it
back into ./debian/lazarus/usr where debhelper tools will expect it to
be and removing the debian directory (and other unwanted stuff) from
the final install directory again.