[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Juha Manninen]

Hi,

Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> It is a matter of resources. The design of the LCL is good. 
> It's goal is 
> - to look and feel native on all platforms. 
> - At the same time it also aims to be Delphi compatible as
>    much as feasible: porting a basic Delphi app to lazarus
>    should be a fairly easy task.
> 
> In my opinion, it succeeds in these goals. More and more so.
> 
> Keeping the various widget-sets up-to-date is just a task that
> requires work and resources. And yes, there will be bugs in the
> process.

Lots of bugs, yes, because it is complicated.
But, that is not the main problem unfortunately. Those libraries have their 
own message notification mechanisms and mapping them to LCL messages causes 
weird errors occurring only with certain clib or x-org or window manager 
versions (or whatever). The QT combobox bug is a good example, it happens only 
in my machine and we still couldn't find the reason.

If you look at the binding code (especially GTK2) and debug it, you soon start 
to question the sanity of its design.
The choice between widget libs is a nice idea, but I think the goal is too 
ambitious.

Please tell me why is it important to connect to many different MULTI-PLATFORM 
libraries from a system that already implements multi-platform support itself 
(LCL/Lazarus)? That makes multi-multi-platform. :-)
There already are native Windows and Mac OS libraries for LCL. The missing 
piece is a native *nix library. (actully dedicated *nix library, there is no 
native one on *nix systems.)

> [...]
> But basing Lazarus' LCL on [fpGUI]: No, thank you.

Yes, I understand the reasoning. Actually the new *nix library doesn't need to 
map any existing library but implement a new one, tailored for LCL only.
The code would be copied shamelessly from fpGui, Fox Toolkit and other high 
quality libraries. They are open source after all.
I would bet that the whole *nix widgetset could be implemented with the same 
amount of code that BINDINGS for GTK2 require now.

When such library works well and can be used for production code, then you 
could improve GTK- and such mappings. They would be more like a curiosity, to 
show people that "Hey, BTW, you can even map to these libraries if you want".

--------

What did you think of my idea of different GUI-specific target modes for 
Lazarus 2.0? I myself feel it is an extremely cool idea!



Regards,
Juha
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