I too am trying to build newest version of lazarus and freepascal from svn.
I tried reading through all documents relating to this, but i got lost in discussions of what branches there are, all possible target platforms,
what file name extensions are used ...
As much as i can see right now, the is very little useful information for people wanting to do this on windows xp 32 bit.
I tried following docs on retrieving from svn and it worked up to the point where i needed to do a "make". Ofcourse, it failed since there was no mention on where make.exe should come from. No links, no advice.
After looking around, this is what i have managed so far to complete :
1. install tortoisesvn client
2. get lazarus from
http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/lazarus/trunk in C:\lazarus
3. get fpc from
http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/fpc/trunk in C:\lazarus\freepascal (i did the job, but on end it failed with some error about svndiff not parsed or reconginzed or decompressed...)
4. executing make, failed because no such exe is found
5. get fpc-2.4.0.i386-win32.exe and install
6. open cmd and set working directory to C:\lazarus
7. execute make, success (some notes and warnings here and there)
8. change working directory to C:\lazarus\freepascal
9. execute make, failed with
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
10. after manually entering sub-directories and doing make (some passed, some failed) i gave up and
11. tried to run C:\lazarus\startlazarus.exe
12. it worked, but got warning that "Freepascal directory was not found."
13. as per help from message i go to Environment -> Environment Options -> Files and try to set directory
14. tried to add folder C:\lazarus\freepascal itself and it's subfolders, but every time i get warning
The FPC source directory [directory i selected] does not look correct. Normally it contains directories like rtl/inc, packages/fcl-base, ...
15. and indeed, there are not such subfolders (are they supposed to be created with that failed "make" ?)
Also, when trying to update C:\lazarus\freepascal from
http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/fpc/trunk i got some error about body not recognized and connection termination.
If this fails i will have no other alternative than to re-install original "lazarus-0.9.28.2-fpc-2.2.4-win32.exe" setup package for windows.
On a positive note, Lazarus is, for me, the only free RAD/IDE that works out of the box.
I tried Code::Blocks and CodeLite, both suffered from severe malfunctioning, ranging from installing of additional packages to just to get them working, up to basic inability to produce even a simple GUI form from wizard without intervention (manual tweaks, fixes, avoiding some options, all had to be looked up in forums...).