[Lazarus] Using different FPC versions

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Mark Morgan Lloyd schrieb:
> Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> 
>> Ah, in this completely un-understandable dialog. I am avoiding it like 
>> the plague :(
>>
>> A GUI is meant to make things simpler, not complicate them, this 
>> dialog is IMHO a prime example of a violation of that principle. 
>> (somewhat like the MS Access visual query builder)
> 
> A useful feature of makefiles (and, for that matter, SQL queries) is 
> that you can annotate them and tell the viewers why you're doing 
> something and warn them of subtleties in your technique.

A drawback of makefiles and all commandline tools is the lack of 
interaction, between the client and server. A decent API for every tool 
instead allows to configure it with e.g. immediate error handling and 
callback functions, before starting an operation. The documentation then 
resides in the source code, that can do much more than only "provide it 
all options and cross your fingers".

In so far I dislike the need for setting up everything in a way so that 
finally commandlines can be created for some tool (fpc,linker...), and 
the tools possibly must be restarted multiple times, with variations of 
the commandline options.

And I agree with Michael that I never understood that dialog, too. It 
reflects the tools, models and strategies used by its designer, which 
have to be explained to, and understood by, every user of that dialog. 
Perhaps the wiki page now makes parts of that puzzle clearer to me, once 
I find the time to study it (and related material) in detail.

Lately I tried to make Lazarus (release and trunk) work in a dedicated 
VM, but ended up in strange error messages in every attempt to run 
something like a hello-world program. Nobody could or wanted to explain 
me what these error messages mean, what might be wrong with my 
installation, and how to cure the problems. So all the nice looking 
configuration dialogs are worth nothing without assistance by further 
wizards, be tools or persons :-(

DoDi