Get up and running with delpy

Requirements

To run delpy you need:

• Python 2.5
• Borland Developer Studio 2006 (to trace and compile programs)
• graphviz (to produce graph diagrams)
• a pdf viewer (to view the diagrams)
• wine (to run win32 binaries on Linux)

Platform notes

delpy is developed and tested on three platforms:

• Windows native (native Delphi platform)
• Cygwin
• Linux (main development platform)

This means that wherever possible the code is all native Python, even at a performance loss.

Both the BDS 2006 compiler DCC32.EXE and the executables it produces will generally run okay under wine, so it's possible to compile Delphi programs in Linux and whenever this is attempted, delpy automatically runs the compiler under wine.

The biggest obstacle to portability across platforms are path names, so delpy will try hard to always pass relative paths to DCC32.EXE, but this might fail if the compiler, the standard library, or the codebase, are either:

• on different Windows volumes (c:, d:)
• on different sides of a Cygwin mount boundary (outside of Cygwin's /)

For this very reason, delpy does not use the system BDS, but rather makes a copy of it to be co-located with delpy. The best practice is thus:

• Keep delpy and your codebase on the same Windows volume
• Under Cygwin, keep delpy and your codebase inside the Cygwin root /, for instance under /home/myuser

Platform convention in this guide

The examples of uses in this guide do not keep a strong convention with respect to which platform they are demonstrated on, because the result is the same. The reader is expected to understand how to run the same command on his platform.

delpy on the PATH

It's a good idea to include delpy in your PATH, so that you only have to type the name of the tool to run it, not the whole path. The examples in this guide assume this to be the case.