[Pkg-pascal-devel] Bug#985946: patch proposal

[David Bannon]

Topic : Lazarus on a ppc64el

Hi Paul, Abou. Thats great timing, I deleted my PPC image about a week
ago to save some diskspace. :-)

I was initially approached to help get tomboy-ng built on ppc64el and,
as an old IBM Power user I thought that would be fun. But I quickly
found I would need some debugging and for Lazarus users, that means the
Lazarus IDE, there I struck some problems and it appeared Debian people
also lost interest.

Personally, I would quite like to be involved here (but the usual time
constraints apply, we all know about that ...) 

I am not sure what I told (Abou ?) earlier this year but here is a
summary of my notes going back to then (current comments following the
"Further -" point.

1. The debian package has some problem with the version numbers. It has
been given a version number in ide/version.inc of 2.0.10+dfsg-4, says
"welcome to 2.0.10+dfsg-4+b2" but is nicely tucked away
/usr/lib/lazarus/2.0.10 and the IDE is rightly confused.  And it did
not install libqt5pas-dev.

Further - I notice (only yesterday) that Lazarus on Debian Bullseye
amd64 has a similar problem, the deb install thinks it has one version
number and the Lazarus source code another. As the Lazarus IDE is
routinely rebuilt, that causes problems until the user bites the bullet
and edits the source code. Generally, many Lazarus users prefer
building from SRC. 

2. So, I built from source and the bigide version will not build due to
a strange error in PascalScript, while lots of warnings about pointer
not portable, it appears to fail at the end of the file without a
specific error message. Not seen anything like that.

Further - sadly I don't remember the details here. Pointer not being
portable on x86 is not an issue, "might" be here.

3. Will build without 'bigide'. However, the simplest app crashes at
exit with a floating point error when run with the debugger. Does not
crash outside debugger ?

Further - being unable to work with gdb is a problem. But newer
releases of Lazarus include a built in debugger, may be interesting to
try that ? I generally use Lazarus trunk/main but understand that
Debian frowns on such approaches (for good reason).

4. Qt5 version of Lazarus IDE does not show component and tool bars.

Further - Generally, Lazarus users use the GTK2 version, it will make a
Qt5 a application and life is just a touch simpler using GTK2 Lazarus.
I understand that Debian wants to downplay GTK2 right now but I suspect
getting the whole thing going with GTK2 initially might be easier. 

This is using above command line, appears to give me a POWER8 with VGA.
Cannot find any qemu docs about what machine is what, so, maybe a trial
and error approach with other machines ?  The XFCe terminal does not
seem to get me any copy and paste or screen dump capabilities (within
the machine) so if I am to do any more I think I will have to try a
Mate install.

Further - by "above command line, I meant -

qemu-img create -f qcow2 ppc64le.img 15G

qemu-system-ppc64le  -machine pseries-2.12  -m 2048 -boot d  -net nic
-net user -hda ppc64le.img -cdrom debian-bullseye-DI-alpha3-ppc64el-
netinst.iso

It is quite possible, given my inexperience with qemu and current power
processors that the above is quite, quite wrong !

I am, of course, willing to listen to any suggestion !

Davo
 

On Thu, 2021-10-28 at 14:49 +0200, Paul Gevers wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> I was just pointed to this bug.
> 
> On Tue, 6 Apr 2021 10:21:43 +1000 David Bannon
> <dbannon at internode.on.net> wrote:
> [...]
> 
> > then I built Lazarus from source (my prefered model) and found more
> > issues that relate, I think, to LCL, particularly under Qt5.  So,
> > in my
> > very uneducated opinion, Lazarus is not yet ready for ppc64el and
> > as its
> > not on the Lazarus's supported list, they won't be very interested
> > in
> > finding out why that is.  They would definitely accept patches but
> > a bug
> > report with no solution will not attract a lot of attention.
> > 
> > I suggest its not really a very good idea to list Lazarus as a
> > supported
> > Debian package on ppc64el. FPC is fine, but not Lazarus. Just my
> > opinion.
> 
> I think Abou (on the list in CC) would love to discuss your
> experience.
> The Debian FreePascal team likes to support Lazarus (and FPC) on all
> Debian supported architectures where feasible, but we need to be made
> aware of issues before we can fix them.
> 
> Paul
>