[Lazarus] nonlcl basic issue: is codetools LCL dependent?

[Giuliano Colla]

Il 28/06/2014 20:30, Marco van de Voort ha scritto:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 05:40:35PM +0200, Giuliano Colla wrote:
>> Sorry for the misunderstanding. I did consider this possibility because
>> we have hundreds of Kylix projects which are still alive, and need
>> maintenance. Kylix IDE can only be used on old platforms/virtual
>> machines but the compiler and the applications still run in the most
>> recent ones.
> I assume they are patched?
>
Nope. A Kilyx binary compiled under a RedHat 9 (Kernel 2.4.27 or so) 
runs under CentoOs 6 as it is. You only need to provide the Borland 
supplied Qt library (libborqt.so) in the loader search path. It also 
runs under a Linux From Scratch, with the latest 3.x kernel. But I 
prefer to recompile under the new platform, to make sure there are no 
libc incompatibilities which might pop up unexpectedly in the long run. 
However the sources are left untouched. I believe this be a sign of good 
design, from the Borland's good old times...
>> Until recently I wasn't aware of the possibility of extending the IDE
>> designer via a Mediator. But given this possibility, I find much more
>> interesting and stimulating the attempt to take advantage of this
>> feature, than the boring task of converting hundreds of Kylix
>> applications to LCL!
> Fun as it may be, it is probably only postponing the inevitable. Still it
> can be worth the effort to avoid converting all of them.
>
> That being said, I wonder if it really belongs to Lazarus. It never was
> styled as a general purpose IDE. OTOH, if this work adds some flexibility to
> the designer, that would be a good thing.
Lazarus provides a wonderful IDE, and supports already quite a number of 
widgetsets. The added capability of supporting non-LCL widgetsets, opens 
quite a number of interesting evolutions, where non-LCL can take 
advantage of a large existing codebase, and LCL may take advantage from 
the comparison with different approaches.

Giuliano