Hello,

as it seems to take longer for the next major release, I'd appreciate if automated snapshots could be provided either daily or weekly.

In the documentation, I found a link to ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/snapshot/trunk/ but I cannot login. I tried with user=anynous and password=my-email-address.

I don't mind the long time for the next release, but it'd help enormously to have the option to download an up-to-date nightly build :)

Kind regards,
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

in case your platform allows to use Container images [1], you might give the Container images of FPC [2] a try.
The beta image is for the next released version of FPC (fixes_3_2 branch) while the trunk/nightly uses the main branch. Depending on the image version you only need to download between 180 and 313 megabytes (the slim images with <50 megabytes are only built for released versions) [3, 4] and it's fully separated from your system installation. You can also use the Dockerfile locally to build the image on your own host. The trunk/nightly image is build every 2nd day-the-week while the beta image is currently only build on the 15th of each month (since there were almost no changes in the past). If a higher frequency is required, its not a problem - just let me know and I'll be changing the schedule.

[1]: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Official_Docker_Images [2]: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/docker
[3]: https://hub.docker.com/r/freepascal/fpc
[4]: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/docker/container_registry/2747086

Kind regards
Nico

Op 27/12/2023 om 12:38 schreef Thomas Kurz via fpc-pascal:

The FTP site has been converted to http because many browsers deprecated the FTP protocol, try http://downloads.freepascal.org/fpc/snapshot/fixes/

Thank you. That's what I've been looking for. Maybe the documentation at https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/user/userse76.html could be updated regarding the new URL?

@Nico: Thanks for pointing me to Docker images, but I do not have Docker support on my Windows, unfortunately. I furthermore fear that it might be complicated to use a dockerized Lazarus.

Is there something special I have to consider when combining FPC-trunk with Lazarus 3.0? I'd like to replace the provided FPC 3.2.2 with the latest trunk snapshot. I guess I have to recompile all packages? Is there something else I need to do?

Thank you,
kind regards,
Thomas

Running a GUI application (like Lazarus) from a container isn't that complicated (just make sure you trust the container you run (depends on your approach) [1]):
- mounting/forwarding your X server socket to the container application
- remote desktop to the container via VNC or xrdp
To simplify this you could use helper tools like x11docker [2].

The X server socket is Linux only but on Windows its even easier: you only need a recent WSL2 version (thus Windows 10 or newer) which comes with WSLg [3]. Then simply install Docker or Podman on your Windows host and start your GUI application in the container.

[1]: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/docker-container-gui-applications [2]: https://github.com/mviereck/x11docker
[3]: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

Kind regards
Nico