Installation dumbness

[mpiazza]

I am trying to install Lazarus into the following directory:
D:\Development Apps\lazarus

Which gives me the following DUMB error:
"Selected folder contains spaces, please select a folder without spaces in it."
NO!

That is where EVERY OTHER development environment I have is installed!  None of them give a toss about spaces in the file path.  What makes you so special?

[backprop]

If you want to use FPC and Lazarus, get used to all kind of quirks. And quite hostile environment. Some things are overcomplicated, but some are not existed at all, as these trivialities with folder, filrname and paths in general...

I do not think is real that any of your suggestion will ever be implemented and I writing this based on my own 25 years or so experience  being involved in this project from time to time reporting many bugs which mainly was quite trivial to solve.

And get used that from time to time all kind of regression will happens... No consistency here.

[Bart]

Some of the tools in the toolchain  fpc uses (like: make) do not handle spaces in filepaths very well (or at least: thet did not in the past). 
The compiler itself, and Lazarus programs don't care about spaces in file paths.

That being said: currently (on Windows at least) I am able to build Lazarus itself (form commandline, and from within IDE) whilst it resides in a path containing spaces.

Bart

[backprop]

Some of the tools in the toolchain  fpc uses (like: make) do not handle spaces in filepaths very well (or at least: thet did not in the past). 

That is maybe in era of Win95 or so and old MSDOS have no clue about long filenames. For make, using quotation marks always was solution, if that you talking about.

[Thaddy]

Most platforms have no idea about dumb paths containing spaces.

[Handoko]

What makes you so special?

Because Lazarus tries to target 'too many' targets:

• AIX
• Amiga
• Android
• AROS
• Atari
• BeOS
• Darwin
• DragonFly
• Embedded
• emx
• FreeBSD
• FreeRTOS
• GBA
• Go32v2
• Haiku
• iPhoneSim
• IOS
• Java
• Linux
• MacOS
• MorphOS
• MSDOS
• NDS
• NetBSD
• NetWare
• NetwLibC
• OpenBSD
• OS2
• PalmOS
• QNX
• Solaris
• Symbian
• Watcom
• wdosx
• Win32
• Win64
• WinCE
• Wii
• Wasi
• Browser
• NodeJS
• Electron
• Module

You can find the list in your Lazarus IDE:
Lazarus main menu > Project > Project Options > Compiler Options > Config and Target > Target OS (-T)

Although Lazarus is a modern development tool, it still targets some very old OSes. To minimal compatibility  issue that may happen with certain OSes and tools, it does not allow you to use space in the filenames. It also will suggest you to use all the lowercase when you save your source code.

[LeP]

Spaces and others chars (like UTF special chars) are still difficult to be used in many OS (i.e. for filenames or folder names), in windows too: too many applications don't work with them.

But spaces should be managed in Windows since decades ...

[Thaddy]

But spaces should be managed in Windows since decades ...

Nope. Make will fail, because make does not support it. And make is a GNU util and not made with Freepascal.
What you can do is use the short path name instead. The tilde type path, like c:\progra~1 for c:\program files or c:\progra~2 for c:\progam files (x86).
You can see them with:

Code: Bash  [Select][+][-]

1. dir /X "C:\"

And use the name that fits your WinDonkey directory.
Then the install will work and it ends up in the spaced directory of WinDonkey.

Your own programs are not affected, but you have to use <singlequote><double quote> paired,
e.g. '"program files"' and that is not unique to Pascal.

[backprop]

All this is totally wrong. If OS have some feature other do not have, RAD should use it, not to say: "This is multiplatform RAD and since we supports so many, we should stick to common denominator!" You should not do that and make tool for instance definitely do not do that.

As you can't use all "features" Pascal gives for modern CPUs on Z80 or AVRs, you can't expect that modern OS features are cut down beasues lack on other platforms. Many things are so fuzzy and weird in FPC and Lazarus as well...

[n7800]

There's a discussion about installing in paths with spaces on the bug tracker. Please post there if you have any specific suggestions or bugs related to this. The general discussion can be continued here - I've added a link here for the developers to see.

[Bart]

All this is totally wrong. If OS have some feature other do not have, RAD should use it, not to say: "This is multiplatform RAD and since we supports so many, we should stick to common denominator!" You should not do that and make tool for instance definitely do not do that.

Whilst Lazarus is X-platform, the installer is a Windows Only feature and warns you about specific problems that may exist on Windows. 

You can camplain about it all you like, but for now it's the way it is.
You can easily install Lazarus from source in a path with as many spaces as you like (although I dare you to install it in a path that ends with a space).
Same for the compiler.

As pointed out, the Lazarus devels are discussing wether we will change that in teh installer in the future.

Bart

[backprop]

You can camplain about it all you like, but for now it's the way it is.
You can easily install Lazarus from source in a path with as many spaces as you like (although I dare you to install it in a path that ends with a space).

Bart, just do not make such things as I do not need it. You are not a programmer, that is not your professional occupation. OP makes reasonable doubt and that is all. You can't bring assumptions why that is not supported here as many other compilers and RADs, at end applications actually supported it on Windows.

[Bart]

There's a discussion about installing in paths with spaces on the bug tracker.

That issue was closed.
I re-opened it.

Bart

[Bart]

You can't bring assumptions why that is not supported here

Those are not assumptions.
In the past, this would simply NOT work on Windows.
That may or may not have been our (fpc/Lazarus) fault, or a limitation of the toolchain used (in the state it was back then), but nevertheless it was a real problem.

I haven't used the installer myself for a long time, I build Lazarus from sources, so I'm not sure wether the current restriction in the Windows installer is still correct.
I hope that you can appreciate that the Lazarus team needs to be absolutely sure all those problems from the past are definitively gone, before we lift that restriction from the installer.
From our point of view it would be a nightmare if users start installing in e.g. C:\Program Files\ and then they suddenly cannot install components or cannot rebuild the IDE anymore.
Please realize that we have limited resources (developers), and this seems not te be high on anyones priority list...

You are not a programmer, that is not your professional occupation

I know, but thank you very much for reminding me 

Bart

[marcov]

Program files is special permission wise, so that, and virtual paths (like my documents etc) are possible other problems other than spaces.

Every external binary is a potential problem(*), but some are only used in special cases (e.g. external LD when try to link certain static libs), and the FPC_native tools (internal assembler,linker and resource stuff) is getting better over time.  The static linking case might be a whole lot better in 3.3.1.

FPCRES is also better, but it still must be put through a wider test, where it is the default.

(*) many of the tools are really old, as non msys haven't been available for a long time. For a simple overview see:
https://wiki.freepascal.org/helper_tools