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
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