Apropos the new users discussion, i think the state of the docs is really important, new users can be discouraged by lack of documentation or up-to-date docs. I just recently retired so not a new young user, but relatily new to fpc. So, I’m willing to help update the docs, correct typos, etc, if someone points me in the right direction.

Regards
Pete

I've been programming a long time but when I first took up with Lazarus and FPC there were three issues:

- out of date documentation.
- for many topics (for example in the LCL) there is formal documentation but not tutorial material.
- distros sometimes have quite old versions in their repos. For example my opensuse machine right now is offering Lazarus 2.2.

[ fpcupdeluxe was invisible at the time. And on a single monitor machine, trunk version 3.9.9 with its greatly improved docked interface is a blessing. ]

Addressing these issues is vital to attract new users.

I'm happy to help anyone writing updated tutorial material.

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 11:52 AM ppadilcdx--- via fpc-pascal <

ppadilcdx--- wrote

Apropos the new users discussion, i think the state of the docs is really important, new users can be discouraged by lack of documentation or up-to-date docs. I just recently retired so not a new young user, but relatily new to fpc. So, I’m willing to help update the docs, correct typos, etc, if someone points me in the right direction.

Check out:

https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/documentation

The manuals are written in LaTeX. Subdirectory tex.

The API reference is written in fpdoc. The xml files are in subdirectory xml.

fpdoc is documented here
https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/fpdoc/fpdoc.html

Michael.

The official FPC documentation can be accessed from here: https://www.freepascal.org/docs.html
These are obviously reference documentation, not getting started or how-to tutorials.
The documentation is hosted here:
https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/documentation Issues reporting mistakes/omissions and merge requests with fixes can be submitted here.

Lazarus documentation is hosted on SourceForge:
https://lazarus-ccr.sourceforge.io/docs/index.html

Tutorials for FPC and Lazarus can be added to the wiki ( https://wiki.freepascal.org/Main_Page).
Perhaps for FPC tutorials take a look at the content of Basic Pascal Tutorial (https://wiki.freepascal.org/Basic_Pascal_Tutorial) and add getting started topics there.

Lazarus tutorials are a bit more scattered, but check here to see what is existing: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Category:Tutorials

On Mon, Oct 21, 2024 at 9:05 AM Gordon Findlay via fpc-pascal <

Gordon Findlay wrote

 - distros sometimes have quite old versions in their repos. For example my opensuse machine right now is offering Lazarus 2.2.

For this, we need help from FPC and Lazarus users, who actually use the given distro. Someone needs to volunteer and become a packager for the distro, so they can maintain it and keep these packages up to date. It may also be helpful to contact the previous maintainer and ask them to update the package, or maybe file a bug report for the distro (I don't know what's appropriate for openSUSE, since I've never used this distro).

Nikolay

There's also this introductory book by Jeff Duntemann: https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=4034

g.

Gordon Findlay wrote

- distros sometimes have quite old versions in their repos. For example my opensuse machine right now is offering Lazarus 2.2.

openSUSE (Tumbleweed) is on 3.6,
as are most/all of the other rolling distributions https://repology.org/project/lazarus/versions

Cheers,
Peter

Thanks!

Also, I think that Michalis Kamburelis' introduction is a must-read for newcomers nowadays:

https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal

Best regards,
Rafael