[Lazarus] Startup environment: to Gui, or not to GUI?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Thu, 4 May 2017, Mark Morgan Lloyd via Lazarus wrote:

> On 11/04/17 09:30, Mark Morgan Lloyd via Lazarus wrote:
>> Apologies if this is an FAQ.
>> Is there an orthodox way that a Lazarus program can very early on look
>> at how it's been started and decide whether it can usefully fall back to
>> a text mode, e.g. to display help info on stdout rather than a messagebox?
>> I'm tinkering with something (a media test program for SDCards etc.)
>> which I'd like to either run as a conventional console program, or using
>> a GUI. I've previously written stuff where operation was entirely
>> dependant on command-line options, but haven't tried making the decision
>> completely automatically.
>
> In case it helps anybody avoid wasted time: looking carefully at what 
> I've been doing, it turns out that it's not possible to make an 
> LCL-based program running on unix (i.e. with X11 etc.) to fall back 
> cleanly to text mode, such that it could be run on e.g. a serial 
> terminal, by manipulating the main program unit (.lpr or whatever).

The simple solution is to write 2 binaries. A text-only one, and a GUI one.
The text-only one starts the GUI one if it detects a GUI (or if a
command-line element is present).

I see no added value in having everything in 1 binary.

Michael.