Note about duplicate units in Lazarus

[marsupilami]

Hello Bob,

staying with Delphi 5 will give you more headaches over time than you get by learning how to use Lazarus and FPC - especially with the new FPC 3.0 that is supported by the latest Zeos 7.2 SVN versions and that can give you a full Unicode environment where you don't have to keep track of the string encodings but where most of things are handeled for you in an automated way that is similar to modern Delpoi versions. Please move on to any new Delphi version or Lazarus. Delphi 5 is dead and although there is an idea for trying to get Zeos 7.2 to compile again on Delphi 6, I doubt that anybody will try to backport it to Delphi 5.

FPC 3.0 and Lazarus will also get you unicode compatibility that already is part of SQLite. Besides that nobody will modify Zeos 6 if anything in the SQLite API - or any other API breaks. A good example for such a breaking thing is Firebird. It is not possible to use any Firebird client library that is newer than Firebird 2.1 with Zeos 6. Sooner or later similar things will happen to other APIs and you will find yourself in a situation where you keep running into more and more problems. Maybe some Unicode Path will hit you because it can't be properly used with the ANSI functions of Delphi 5 or maybe Microsoft will break some function in the ANSI API or maybe even SQLite will break its own API or ....

The longer you wait, the more time it will take to make the conversion from Delphi 5 to any modern environment.

I don't know what things Lazarus can't handle with similar grace as Delphi. But it surely makes more sense to work around these edges than sticking to Delphi 5. If you have questions on Lazarus just ask them here and on the Lazarus Forums. But honestly I refuse to even try to support something as old as Delphi 5 and Zeos 6. There is enough work to do on Zeos 7.

Best regards,

Jan

[miab3]

@IbeDBob, @marsupilam

Problems tend to be longer with Delphi 7.
I use only occasionally Delphi2007, for very old applications.
Some manufacturers offer these libraries from Delphi XE2 upward.

Michal

[marsupilami]

Sooo - I finally managed to modify the packages and checked the modifications into testing-7.2