Status of FPC 3.4.0 or FPC 4.0.0 [major release]

[Martin_fr]

The ones I recognize are PascalDragon, Martin_fr and marcov.

Actually, I am not in the FPC team. (Lazarus is a separate team)

[BeniBela]

could this not be solved by distributing Lazarus as a source-only package with a (user run) build script that checks for the presence of GTK2, Qt5, Qt6 and asks the user to select between the ones that are found to be present?

with Debian logic, that would require a dependency on  GTK2, Qt5, and Qt6 each

[vfclists]

The question I'm asking is whether this is the right place to have this discussion?

Personally I believe it is because I also believe there are a number of forum members who would gladly invest their time into helping make the next release a reality.

I think part of the problem is that how to help is left rather unclear and, so far, I haven't seen a request to have the community assist.

I did a google site search on "How to contribute to FPC development" and these are the links which came up, with the first appearing to be the most relevant.

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=56169.0

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=26569.0

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,73433.0.html

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=62337.15

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=53393.0

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=46038.0

The kind of information people need is quite sparse, not only that building FPC to test for the bugs does take some time.

Can the developers create something like ready made VMs or Docker systems that enable contributors to quickly go through the paces to test patches, or have something like that made to their specifications?

[n7800]

Search the wiki, official guides, and "README" files in the distribution:
* https://www.freepascal.org/docs.html
* https://wiki.freepascal.org/Compiler_development_articles
* https://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_development
* https://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_internals
* https://wiki.freepascal.org/Testing_FPC
* https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/tests/readme.txt

Be careful, there's a lot of outdated information, and many wiki pages were written by regular users (not developers). Feel free to improve it if you're confident (or leave comments on the "talk page").

EDITED: Pay special attention to the "Compiling the compiler" section.

[Martin_fr]

I don't know if it is linked from any of the pages: https://wiki.freepascal.org/buildfaq

[Graeme]

The kind of information people need is quite sparse, not only that building FPC to test for the bugs does take some time.

Tell me about it.    I'm debugging something in the compiler. Make a change, wait 4m18s to rebuild, then test if my change worked. Over and over. I really need to figure out how to only compile the compiler part and not the RTL, FCL etc.

[Martin_fr]

Tell me about it.    I'm debugging something in the compiler. Make a change, wait 4m18s to rebuild, then test if my change worked. Over and over. I really need to figure out how to only compile the compiler part and not the RTL, FCL etc.

The following should work, but may cease anytime...

make compiler_cycle PP=/path/ppc_exe 

I don't know if it can be even shorter, never looked. It normally does 3 cycles, assuming that you start with the prior release.
But if you start with a ppc of the exact commit that you want to compile, then you should only need the last cycle. (but I don't know how to make that happen).

[BeniBela]

The kind of information people need is quite sparse, not only that building FPC to test for the bugs does take some time.

Tell me about it.    I'm debugging something in the compiler. Make a change, wait 4m18s to rebuild, then test if my change worked. Over and over. I really need to figure out how to only compile the compiler part and not the RTL, FCL etc.

you can open the lpi with Lazarus and compile it from there

[Graeme]

The following should work, but may cease anytime...

make compiler_cycle PP=/path/ppc_exe 

Ah, thank you Martin. I'll give that a try. I did `make compiler cycle` - which didn't work. 

[Graeme]

you can open the lpi with Lazarus and compile it from there

Wait, what! Really?? 

[marcov]

you can open the lpi with Lazarus and compile it from there

Wait, what! Really?? 

Afaik Florian has maintained such a .lpi since before 2010.   

[n7800]

you can open the lpi with Lazarus and compile it from there

Wait, what! Really?? 

Afaik Florian has maintained such a .lpi since before 2010.

I definitely remember reading this in some guide (not a forum or mailing list), but I couldn't find it now in the programmer's guide, the wiki, or the "buildfaq.pdf"...

[PascalDragon]

How many FPC developers, committers and release managers are involved in this thread?

The ones I recognize are PascalDragon, Martin_fr and marcov.

The question I'm asking is whether this is the right place to have this discussion?

As Martin_fr said, he's team Lazarus, not team FPC. 😉
And yes, otherwise it's only me and marcov here in this thread.

you can open the lpi with Lazarus and compile it from there

Wait, what! Really?? 

Yes, really. A lpi exists for each platform and as long as the compiler doesn't rely on functionality from main's RTL this works very well (and due to that we usually take care not to rely on main functionality, so that this keeps working 😉). Works also rather well with the debugger of Lazarus 😁