Thanks Roberto. I think though, that this still isn't a
complete Harbour distro, as its missing crucial parts as
hbmk2, hbrun, hbi18n, .dlls and INSTALL doc. Which means
the even the most important pointers and tools are missing
which are used as a starting point in normal Harbour usage
and support.
I not agree.
IMHO, HMG IS NOT a Harbour distribution.
HMG is an xBase Windows-GUI development system that uses Harbour as
xBase compiler.
I've preferred Harbour over other compilers for a lot of reasons,
but eventually (if conditions changes) it could be replaced for any
other freely redistributable one.
While this is perfectly okay, I don't agree with your
approach to distribute crippled Harbour.
Maybe we should have our license extended to not allow
that to happen. This way there is no point at all to give
general support on HMG site, as the toolset is a partial
one, not containing important parts. Even if these parts
are not to the direct benefit of all HMG users or developers.
If your goal is to supply a compact package for users,
IMO you should simply just not include Harbour itself
and mingw, but rather simply install into existing Harbour
install and provide links to Harbour installer to users.
This is an interesting area, and there are few more steps
that could be done to make that easier. F.e. storing
Harbour install dir in registry and finalize placement of
3rd party files inside the Harbour dir tree.
Anyhow now it's at least possible to replace
bundled Harbour with an official distro, which is good,
but for me it seems that giving support for the bundled
one is not easily possible yet.
One of the features of HMG is to be compact. The official distro is
plenty of things that are usually not needed for HMG users (that
eventually could download the full Harbour distro if needed).
All Harbour and contrib libraries are 'intact' (exactly as are
distributed). The same applies for 'harbour.exe' and basic docs. So,
bugs in Harbour compiler found by HMG users should be not a problem
for Harbour developers.
This is not true. Important elements from distribution
are left out. The most basic doc is INSTALL, which is
also left out. Harbour isn't equal to harbour.exe + selected
set of static libs. It can work, but it's incomplete.
We haven't been talking about bug reports, we've been talking
about giving "general Harbour support". Giving general Harbour
support is not possible if major parts of Harbour are missing.
So if a user comes by and says, "I've installed HMG and I'd like
to create a hello world app, how can I do it?", Someone could say:
"type hbmk2 hello.prg". User won't know what I'm talking about.
Instead he will find a COMPILE.BAT, which no Harbour developer
knows anything about.
Usually all bug analysis start with getting to know how the app
was built, and many time the build process is at fault, or it
can even create strange results very difficult to anticipate.
So, current step is one in the good direction, but not enough to
achieve original goal (proposed by Massimo).
To sum it up the two crucial part which is missing from distro
are: hbmk2.exe and INSTALL.
If you want to save space hbrun.exe can be left out, and hbi18n.exe
is replaced by hbmk2 for the most part, so it's not crucial. You
can also save space by including a .dll built hbrun.exe +
harbour*.dlls. Even hbmk2 can be built against the .dll.
In the technical side:
I've attempted to include and use HMBK2 in HMG but I've faced a
serious problem.
Report and forms in HMG can be in separate text files that can be
included in prgs.
The problem is that we use commands to do that, that are translated
by PP to #includes.
So, HBMK do not recognize them as include files and changes do not
force recompilation of prgs.
Can you describe this process in a little more detail? Last
time I've implemented some hbmk2 features specifically for HMG,
but got no response after I've sent to you the solution, so
I don't know where to pickup this thread exactly.
In the meantime, I'd like to suggest to give support for general
Harbour issues on Harbour's official forums. Otherwise users will
meet with a crippled Harbour, which defeats the whole point of
recent discussions, and support will just be scattered in even
more places and adds more confusion to current state IMO.
Brgds,
Viktor
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