[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 6:59 PM, Graeme Geldenhuys
<graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a continuation of my issues regarding the tab-type components.
> Lazarus team doesn't have enough manpower or resources to maintain
> duplicate components,

Like what? TNotebook and TPageControl? They have the same internal (in
the interfaces) implementation, it's not really so much duplicated
code.

> This worrying issues is more visible lately than ever before. I'm
> starting to worry that Lazarus team is trying so hard to catch a
> moving target (delphi) and trying to implement many fancy features,
> that nothing actually ends up becoming stable or compatible for long.

I see absolutely no connection. It's not like we are developing Mono
with Microsoft releasing incompatible stuff every 6 months.

> The old English saying holds true here: "Jack of all trades, but
> master of none". Look how long GTK1 took to become stable, and just

Gtk 2 has been around at least since 2002, that's 8 years now. Try
asking anywhere else about gtk1 and will react like you want pierced
card support in your kernel.

It's not the target that moves fast, it's just gtk that is
exceptionally hard to program + our gtk2 interface is very old and
mixed with gtk1 and thus has a somewhat spaguetti code. Just compare
with how fast the Qt interface improved by using a better toolkit and
a newer cleaner code.

> I have also been seeing more and more developers complaining that
> their patches are not even being looked at - the core team seem to be
> preoccupied with other stuff. Yes I know we are all busy and have REAL
> jobs, but then give more developers write access and delicate work to
> those developers.

Maybe they should become developers.

Ideally we would need someone payed by a company using Lazarus to
developed Lazarus full-time or at least part-time, like lot's of open
source projects have. Until that happens we will always face a lot of
floating in the development based on the free time of the current
developers.

> But that leaves no real
> stable working version of Lazarus!

Sure there is a stable release, the latest one is 0.9.28.2 you should
use that one to present Lazarus.

> Seriously you guys don't think you can keep
> up with a commercial funded company and still implement your own
> unique features.

Do you really think they implemented so much useful stuff since Delphi 7?

> Lazarus needs it's own set of goals, not the goals of
> Embarcadero.

Why do you think we are following Embarcadero blindly? Are we encoding
our strings in UTF-16 and having a IDE with 1 window? Not really ...

> And things are just going to get worse when Embarcadero
> releases their cross-platform compiler and toolkit in a year or so.

I have my doubts if this will happen so early. Anyway, if they really
turn around it can only be good for Lazarus. They will attract newer
Pascal developers and then some of those might become Lazarus
developers.

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho