[Lazarus] KOL-CE and TKOLDataModule

[Usuario Anónimo]

Aleš Katona wrote:

 > Fair enough about the quote, but the wording you used originally made
 > the impression of blackmailing on me, that's where the original
 > tension is from.

That was certainly not my intention and I apologise without reservation 
to anybody who took it that way.

However if somebody had said "C# won't do what you want because it 
doesn't have a decent form designer or integrated debugger" it would 
certainly have reinforced my preference to stay with Lazarus.

 > I understand your position and the original message now, and to
 > explain my reaction, we get some people here which when their personal
 > needs are not met (usually bussiness driven people), end up being all
 > negativist about the project and start a sort of mini-war about how
 > they'll go to <insert other project here> and how ours sucks etc.
 > usually very immature reactions.

My position is that if somebody wants a feature in a piece of 
open-source software and has commercial resources they should sponsor 
its development with a bounty. I've never said "I want this feature", I 
admit that I have rather thrown my hands up in horror when something 
doesn't work (e.g. hiding the menu bar in gtk1), stops working (SPARC in 
0.9.26) or is implausibly slow (e.g. gtk2 to a remote X screen). If 
somebody doesn't have commercial resources they should use their free 
time to learn how to add the facilities they want. If somebody has 
neither commercial resources nor free time I guess a bit of charity is 
in order, but they certainly shouldn't /demand/ anything :-)

 > As to the problem of Gtk2/LCL speed, it's still quite possible there's
 > a bug in LCL which does some unnecessary drawing/signals in gtk2 (this
 > was so in the past, but on my end/setup was fixed).

I don't think that speed is really the issue. The "Big Freeze" after 
mouse movement is far more serious, and using Wireshark I've not seen 
LAN traffic during this- I might be wrong and will revisit if I've got time.

 > Many people get problems with remote lazarus tho, but I'm not sure if
 > it's only Lazarus/LCL or also other gtk2 programs.

I think it's specific to Lazarus in this case since I've not seen other 
problems with Debian "Lenny" which defaults to gtk2, and I almost 
invariably run this to a remote screen. It could be some rarely-used 
facility in the gtk2 libraries that is only being used by the LCL, but 
that is tantamount to saying it's a Lazarus problem.

 > Also as I said before, gtk2 performance in general depends heavily on
 > many aspects including the drivers, theme, it's version and settings
 > in X.org (for examply my "miraculous" speed is actually result of
 > using the EXA accelmethod).

Understood, and I think that the significant difference in gtk2 
performance between the two machines I was using as "X terminals" (I 
prefer that term because so many people get confused by discussion of 
what a server is in this context) suggests that at least part of the 
speed issue is dependent upon properties or facilities negotiated 
between gtk and X. However as I've said I don't think reduced 
performance is the significant issue here.

Going back to your earlier question about display types, both systems 
that I was using as X terminals for test purposes are probably far too 
old to have significant hardware acceleration- certainly as is 
understood today. The IBM PC-310 is reported by lspci to have an S3 
86C864, the Sony Maiow is reported by NT to be a NeoMagic MagicGraph 
128XV; in both cases they are operating at 1024x768x16 (I think) and 
have about 2Mb RAM. Obviously the video in Sun systems is custom, there 
are issues on that platform about what kernel versions support 
acceleration for GLX that I think aren't relevant to the current 
discussion; the IBM has a Savage which again has acceleration issues 
which I don't think are relevant since in general I'm not using it as a 
display device. The remaining Compaqs have onboard video, I might be 
able to replace the 3000 with something marginally newer from our 
hardware store but I don't think the details are relevant.

I need to press on with a bit of USB hacking to keep people happy at 
this end, I'm also trying to revisit 0.9.27+gtk2 on SPARC. If I can I'll 
try to look at the menu bar issue with gtk1, but the "Big Freeze" almost 
certainly needs more familiarity with the LCL's innards than I will be 
able to build up in finite time.

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

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