Hi I have just witnessed how difficult installing Lazarus on Apple Mac can be, although I think the same applies to other operating systems, too. I made a program for my friend using Lazarus. He has a modern Mac but he mostly just browses Internet and writes e-mails and talks with Skype and doesn't care about the technical details. His English skills are poor. In essence he is not a geek.
We had a Skype line open and he tried to install Lazarus and FPC. I felt like trying to drive a car with eyes folded. He didn't know even the basic things like using a command line. We wasted like 3 hours fighting with the installation and it still didn't work! Both Lazarus and FPC were installed but always gave errors. Later I realized the wiki page tells you to install "Apple Developer tools". I didn't realize it then. Now a question for Mac people: should we proceed with the newly found instructions for Mac or should we use a Windows laptop which he can borrow? At least I have installed Lazarus on Windows and could help him. Are there some traps to look at when installing for Mac? Now a more generic thought : * Easy installation is more important than the core developers may understand. The typical claim is that if you are clever enough to program, you must be clever enough to install FPC and Lazarus somehow. No! For example my friend is not interested in programming but still he needs Lazarus to build the program I made. I can't compile a binary for him because I don't have a Mac. Cross-compiling for Mac is beyond my skills. Otherwise Lazarus is so easy to use for anyone. You add some controls to a form and click the green arrow, like in a media player, and the program compiles and runs. There is much complexity behind the scenes to make this happen. Something should be done for the installation in general. It should be more automatic like for most other programs. Now a good Linux distro seems to be the easiest platform for installation. The package manager takes care of FPC dependency when installing Lazarus. Me and Marcos Douglas have recently improved the installation wiki pages a little but that is not enough. --- About the program I made: My friend, instead of being a geek, is a talented construction worker. He has a pile of wood boards (the traditional meaning, sawed slices of wood), which he can measure in advance. He must choose a set of them to make a desired length and then saw away the leftover piece. My program takes the desired length and the lengths of available boards and chooses the best combination so that the leftover is minimal. This has been a problem always in construction work but there is no SW solution available, according to my friend. If "n" is the number of available boards then there are 2 ^ n combinations to make, the same as "1" bits in a binary number of "n" digits. Boy, the current computers are fast. The data is only a short integer array which easily fits into processor cache. Then integer arithmetic and some bit shifting. For example 25 boards (2 ^ 25 = 33 554 432 combinations) is calculated in ~ 2 secs on a mini-laptop. I haven't even make any obvious optimizations yet. Juha -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
