I need to compile multiple Delphi packages.
I have BDSCOMMONDIR environment variable = C:\Users\Public\Documents\RAD Studio<strong>Common (both in the system itself and in overrides in XE8 IDE).
$(BDSCOMMONDIR)\Dcp is included in XE8 library path.
I manually specified output directories for dcp and bpl in FinalBuilder actions = C:\Users\Public\Documents\RAD Studio\Common\dcp and C:\Users\Public\Documents\RAD Studio\Common\bpl
These settings work in all RAD Studio versions, except for XE8. IDE can compile all packages as expected, but not FinalBuilder.
I compile the package A, then the package B (it requires package A). When compiling the package B, the compiler returns an error that A.bpl is not found.
If I copy files from C:\Users\Public\Documents\RAD Studio\Common to c:\Users\Public\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\16.0, all is compiled successfully.
Why does it uses c:\Users\Public\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\16.0?
FB 7.0.0.3291
This is not a critical problem, because it has a simple workaround - replacing $(BDSCOMMONDIR)\Dcp to C:\Users\Public\Documents\RAD Studio\Common\dcp in XE8 library path.
Another problem with XE8: FinalBuilder needs BDSCatalogRepository environment variable to expand its library path.
This is not a critical problem as well, because I can add this variable manually.
FinalBuilder virtualizes BDSCOMMONDIR, BDSUSERDIR, BDSPROJECTSDIR and LANGDIR per compiler version. The reason it does this is to allow for multiple compiler versions. Without this virtualization, you would run into problems when you have multiple versions of rad studio installed, since those variables would be set for the most recently installed versions. This caused a lot of problems for users before FinalBuilder 7.
The downside is that the variables are hard coded to their default values that rad studio set when installing. In FinalBuilder 8 we have changed the variables architecture (internally at least) so you will be able to modify those variables by script.
My suggestion would be to not rely on BDSCOMMONDIR, instead define your own variable in rad studio, and then define the same variable in FinalBuilder and set it appropiately for the version of delphi.