Before retirement I rose to the dizzying heights of Senior Software Consultant which meant I had to be pretty good at most things, but IT was always somebody else's job, so please treat me like a no nothing end user as far as installations go!
Having done a lot of Delphi at work I naturally started there at home. Also, when I found I could program my then new WM phone I did that with Basic4PPC. I was mainly only amusing myself but released my programs on my website as freeware just in case anybody else might want to use them.
Then I found Lazarus and started using it. I reached a stage of temporarily not having any new ideas so decided to simplify things by translating the older Delphi stuff to Lazarus which was mainly straight forward, but in some cases anything but! That process now being complete, and noting that my download counters for my WM programs are still regularly ticking up I decided to see if they could also be translated. So I read the Lazarus documentation and found
https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/arm-wince Naturally I decided to go with the Easy way.
I didn't get the Win32 version of fpc because I'm already using it being on a 32 bit Win 7 system. I got the arm-wince cross installer. So I ran a default install, then tried tp rebuild an existing trivial project. The Config and Target dialog said the configuration was not supported.
Out to Windows Explorer. Hmm. Both C:\ Lazarus and C:\FPC. So I have my first look inside C:\Lazarus (after all these years!). I spot the fpc folder so figure I should copy my new files to there. Then Restart Lazarus. That makes no difference, still not supported. So look inside C:\Lazarus\fpc. Ah! Two folders, 3.2.0 and 3.2.2. Check back in C:\FPC and yup I see 3.2.0.
So I figure I need to merge the two versions into the 3.2.2 folder. Yay! Now the configuration is accepted. So much for the simplistic instruction "install".
So were my troubles over? Nope! I tried to build my trivial project and got the error "fcllaz.pas(11,3) Fatal: Cannot find db used by fcllaz of package FCL." I checked the fcp file structure again and found db files for both versions in C:\lazarus\fpc\3.2.2\units\arm-wince\fcl-db and C:\lazarus\fpc\3.2.2\units\i386-win32\fcl-db. So that looks correct for wince.
I tried forcing the issue by adding the wince path above in the Paths dialog of Project Options. That made no difference.
So I searched the problem on the web. Loads of results, too many to look at. I looked at the first several. They were all dated 2018 and for linux. Worringly, the one on here was marked as Closed! But, at least as far as Windows is concrend the bug is clearly not fixed.
A suggested workround of using an ealier version of fpc may have made sense in 2018, but is surely far too obsolete now, that puts off using it.
So, have I done something wrong or is there a bug that needs fixing? Please reread my first paragraph to avoid giving me an answer I won't understand.
Thank you.