On 26 January 2012 15:37, Marco van de Voort wrote: >> I think what he meant was, having the ability of reusing the Kylix >> help files, while Lazarus seriously lacks good / any documentation for >> the LCL. > > Maybe. But this should not be recommended. It is escapism (and of legal > uncertainty).
I certainly agree that it is escapism. But back in the day (3 to 5+ years back) LCL had zero documentation, FPC CHM files did not exist, and neither did DocView or the FPC INF help files. Then, using the Kylix 3 help files was immensely useful. Oh, and I am a legal and registered owner of Kylix 3 Open Edition, Kylix 3 Professional and Kylix 3 Enterprise. So what I do with Kylix in my personal capacity is my right. As for me giving out my Kylix 3 Open Edition license key... I emailed Borland and Embarcadero regarding the registration problem with Kylix 3 OE, and made my intent clear. There official answer was they have no way of registering new Kylix 3 OE users, even though Kylix 3 OE is freely available for download from various location on the internet, and even though there are Kylix 3 OE based projects on SourceForge (thus now stuck because no new Kylix users can register and use Kylix). I did publish their reply to some Kylix newsgroups - Google should be able to find that. I welcome Borland or Embarcadero to send me a letter regarding my K3 OE license key. I'll give them another mouth full about how bad this "must register your product online to use it - even though the product is free for all" idea is. > And certainly it is crazy to start developing to support that heavily aging > mess. By no means did I imply that Lazarus must now support HyperHelp file formats. >> At least the Kylix 3 help is easily obtained in a legal manner. > > How so? Is it licensed for use without Kylix at all then? See above. Anybody is allowed to download and use Kylix 3 Open Edition - it was released for the open source community. When you download that, you get a copy of the K3 help too. > Moreover, IMHO 3rd party devels doing this is their business, but IMHO > FPC/Lazarus shouldn't be recommending this kind of stuff I'm not a FPC or Lazarus core developer. ;-) >> seeing that Lazarus's goal is to be a clone of Delphi VCL, this could work >> in a pinch. > > IMHO it is a step backwards. Maybe that is true now, now that we have INF help files, CHM help files, and that work is actually being done to document LCL. But 5+ years ago, Kylix 3's HyperHelp was the only way to get context sensitive help in Lazarus IDE. > the Lazarus/FPC projects should not be advocating this. Specially not when > they formally have cleanroom policies in place. Just to make it clear, I am also not implying that the Kylix 3 Help content must be copied into the Lazarus LCL help. >> know, Lazarus doesn't support WinHelp format, but maybe a similar >> trick can be applied as was done for HyperHelp. > > Winhelp is RTF based. See above. I did not imply copying Kylix's help text. -- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://fpgui.sourceforge.net -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
