[Lazarus] Painting performance

[Roland Turcan]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> I agree with Henry. Linux is free, simply upgrade - there is no goodreason not to stay up-to-date.

There can be plenty of good reasons, particularly when a distro drops a 
package that users are used to (e.g. Debian dropping SeaMonkey AKA 
IceApe). At that point a site can continue to have a fairly robust set 
of systems by simply upgrading kernels, but upgrading libraries and 
"middleware" can be vastly more difficult.

As you go on to note, at that point it's possible to stick at an older 
version of FPC and/or Lazarus, although it sometimes takes quite a lot 
of work finding out exactly what versions will run. However that means 
that any problems the user has cannot be addressed by telling him to get 
the latest version from SVN or to use the latest snapshot.

Frankly, it's a dilemma. It's unreasonable to expect the developers to 
limit themselves to older library (gtk etc.) versions, and it's 
undesirable to lose users by telling them that they have to upgrade when 
they can't.

I think that one thing that would be useful would be a table somewhere- 
possibly in a wiki- of the latest FPC/Lazarus versions that users have 
found to work on a particular platform.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]