I have installed fpc from sources before but it's been a while and I've forgotten how to get it done, or perhaps something has changed and need some help.

When i am trying to do is install and run the latest version of fpc from my home folder. Here is what I did:

# first I got a working version of fpc installed using sudo apt-get install fpc

# then i made a ~/fpc and got a copy fpc sources there svn co http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/lazarus/trunk lazarus

# finally did a make all follow by make install to my home folder make all
make install
make install INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/myusername

Great success! Now I have a ~/bin (/home/myusername/bin) folder with all the fpc binaries as well as ~/share and ~/lib. Then put /home/myusername/bin in my path.

Problem:

When I type fpc I get:

Free Pascal Compiler version 2.4.4-2ubuntu1 [2011/09/27] for i386 Copyright (c) 1993-2010 by Florian Klaempfl
/usr/lib/fpc/2.4.4/ppc386 [options] <inputfile> [options]

And not the version I just built and installed in my ~/bin folder. When I open a terminal and cd to ~/bin and execute ./fpc ... I get the same result.

Help:

How do I setup fpc to use the compiler in my ~/bin folder?

Anthony Walter wrote on Mon, 02 Apr 2012:

Those are not the FPC sources, but the Lazarus sources. The fpc sources are in http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/fpc/trunk

# finally did a make all follow by make install to my home folder make all make install make install INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/myusername

This first installs everything in the root (make install), and then again in your home directory (make install INSTALL_PREFIX=...). That may not be what you want.

Great success! Now I have a ~/bin (/home/myusername/bin) folder with all the fpc binaries as well as ~/share and ~/lib. Then put /home/myusername/bin in my path.

If you did in fact compile and install FPC rather than Lazarus (it's better to copy/paste the actually executed commands rather than typing everything again from memory): the "fpc" binary looks for a compiler binary in its own directory, and if it doesn't find it there then it will look for it in the PATH.

However, "make install" does not create/overwrite any symbolic links to the actual compiler binaries in the $INSTALL_PREFIX/bin, so as not to change the default compiler version that has potentially already been installed in that same prefix. This means that the new fpc will still find the old (symlink to the) compiler binary in /usr/bin.

If you do want to change the default compiler, also execute the following command:
make FPC=`pwd`/compiler/ppc386 -C compiler installsymlink INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/myusername

(replace ppc386 with ppcx64 if you built an x86-64 compiler)

Jonas

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Thanks. Yes I wanted to get fpc (the compiler) installed from sources rather than lazarus. Your advice somewhat got me there, but now when I compile the source/units are not found.

cd /home/myusername
sudo apt-get install fpc
mkdir fpc
svn co http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/lazarus/trunk lazarus cd fpc
# now i'm at at /home/myusername/fpc/fpc
make all
make FPC=`pwd`/compiler/ppc386 -C compiler installsymlink INSTALL_PREFIX= /home/myusername
make install INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/myusername
cd /home/myusername

Then I created Hello.pas:

program Hello;
begin
  WriteLn('Hello');
end.

And then:

fpc Hello.pas

Error:

Free Pascal Compiler version 2.7.1 [2012/04/02] for i386 Copyright (c) 1993-2012 by Florian Klaempfl and others Target OS: Linux for i386
Compiling Hello.pas
Fatal: Can't find unit system used by Hello
Fatal: Compilation aborted
Error: /home/delluser/bin/ppc386 returned an error exitcode

Anthony Walter wrote on Mon, 02 Apr 2012:

Here you are again checking out the lazarus sources?

make FPC=`pwd`/compiler/ppc386 -C compiler installsymlink INSTALL_PREFIX=

/home/myusername

make install INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/myusername

It's probably better to switch the order of those two commands.

The default FPC configuration file is /etc/fpc.cfg and it includes information for units installed globally. If you install them elsewhere, you have to create an alternate configuration file that tells the compiler where to find them.

The easiest way is probably to copy /etc/fpc.cfg to ~/.fpc.cfg (notice the leading dot) and then replace all /usr/lib/fpc with /home/myusername/fpc. This means however that every compiler invocation will use this alternate configuration file, so also when using the globally installed 2.4.4 (which in turn will then complain that it can't find /its/ units).

If you also want to be able to use the globally installed FPC (by e.g. explicitly calling /usr/bin/ppc386), it's probably best to put the above in ~/.fpc-trunk.cfg, and then create a ~/.fpc.cfg with the following contents:

#ifdef VER2_7
#include /home/myusername/.fpc-trunk.cfg
#else
#include /etc/fpc.cfg
#endif

You will have to replace the VER2_7 with newer version numbers when the version number in svn trunk is changed though. Alternatively, you can switch around the then/else branches and use VER2_4 instead, but then you'll have the same problem when the version number of the globally installed version changes.

Jonas

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