Installing trunk or a very recent version

[SymbolicFrank]

A brief summary:
- do not use trunk, apart from testing
- do use the latest available stable release.

So, in other words: do not contribute patches / extensions, because it takes at least a year before you can use them.

[rvk]

So, in other words: do not contribute patches / extensions, because it takes at least a year before you can use them.

You can contribute and ask if they put the fix in "fixes". They are available much sooner.

You can use trunk for production but need to be prepared for everything.
Even a version that can't compile after pulling in the latest trunk.

If you are not, then yes, don't use trunk.

BTW. If you contribute a fix, you can use that fix yourself of course. No need to wait for a new release.
For other fixes, you are dependent on the fixes releases.

[TRon]

For WSL special rules apply, you can't handle it just like an ordinary Linux. You need to adjust PATH so that it doesn't pick up Windows binaries. E.g. on my system the PATH by default looks like this:

OK, thank you for that answer as that explains a few things.

Do you happen to know if it could be avoided to have to alter the path ? E.g. I was expecting that invoking the correct make executable (Linux version) would be enough for the makefile to pick up on the fact that the host is Linux (and not Windows). Unfortunately I do not have Windows and/or WSL to be able to verify myself.

I might have found a solution that does not require tampering with the path variable. The solution mentioned here seems to get rid of WSL and its mz interpretation/delegation/execution. The cure might be worse than the disease though.

[PascalDragon]

Since at least FPC > 2.6.x, it has never caused trouble to rebuild the compiler, rtl, packages etc ... using a start compiler that is the same version as the new compiler, in the build cycle, the 3rd pass compiler actually compiles itself with itself.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The exact same revision/commit is never a problem. However we do not support compiling revision X of 3.3.1 with a different revision Y of 3.3.1, because there can be changes in the RTL that the compiler from version Y can not cope with (and that's not a theory, that are things that did happen already). Because 3.3.1 is a moving target it's easier to say that the only supported version is the last stable release.