In practice, the rebuilding issues don't apply to FPC/FPC-src. Yours is a very good argument when applied to Lazarus. And there are several more good reasons to keep Lazarus in user space. My recommended approach is to install FPC/FPC-src from debs and download Lazarus source into user space and build it there.
+1
Exactly! I don't know why people confuse these 2 projects so badly.
@ottod, dbannon asked you why FPC 3.0.4 could not be used from the distro's repository. You started to explain Lazarus issues. Why?
The best way to get a recent Lazarus is to build from sources using the FPC provided by your distro. Building and installing FPC from sources is difficult. Building Lazarus from sources is easy. No installation is needed.
Once FPC is there, just do: "
svn co ..." (either Lazarus fixes or trunk), then "
make". And that's it.
Using external .deb packages is unfortunately a source of continuous problems. This forum has seen hundreds of threads about installing those packages for Ubuntu, Mint and other Debian derivatives.