SysTools

SysTools is a set of utility routines and classes originally developed by TurboPower Software and now (as of February, 2003) available as open source.

If you are not a SysTools user, then you can skip the rest of this document as it mainly discusses Rubicon installation issues with SysTools.

Rubicon has always relied on a handful of SysTools routines and classes. TurboPower granted Tamarack Associates a license to redistribute the necessary SysTools units in dcu form with Rubicon. Since most Rubicon users would not have SysTools installed (and we did not redistribute the SysTools packages), the Rubicon packages linked directly to the SysTools units. This approach worked fine for all the Rubicon non-SysTools users.

For SysTools users, however, this approach made it impossible to install the standard Rubicon distribution with SysTools since they both relied on a number of the same units. The workaround for this was to supply an alternate set of Rubicon packages that were compiled assuming the user had SysTools installed. 

This worked in most cases except when the user had an older version of SysTools installed (older versions used different package names). In this case, the user would have to recompile the Rubicon packages.

For all of the above reasons (not to mention trial run version issues), when SysTools was made open source, Tamarack Associates contacted TurboPower requesting permission to redistribute the source code for the required units. TurboPower granted this request and the units are included with Rubicon starting in version 2.20.

In order to avoid package conflicts, the SysTools units have been renamed (e.g. StBase is now rbStBase). This allows the standard Rubicon 2 packages to coexist 
with the SysTools packages.

Under some rare conditions, this arrangement may cause conflicts. This would only occur if you are: 1) using TStBits or TStDict in an application and accessing Rubicon components that use the same classes and 2) using these classes to access Rubicon data structures. The simplest solution here would to rename the StBits and StDict references in your units' USES clauses to rbStBits, rbStBase, etc.

If you need to completely integrate Rubicon and SysTools, then you need to

• enable the HaveSysTools option in rbDefine.inc
• disable the ThreadSafe option in stDefine.inc (recommended)
• add the appropriate SysTools package name to the requires section of rb20rXXr.dpk (e.g. add s403_r70 to the requires section of rb20r70r.dpk)
• check that the SysTools path is visible to the compiler
• recompile rb20rXXr.dpk
• recompile all other Rubicon packages
• exit Delphi or C++Builder
• copy all the new rb20rXXr.bpl files to your system directory