[Lazarus] Release 1.0, part 2

[zeljko]

On Sunday 29 November 2009 05:14, Tom Lisjac wrote:
> Businesses laugh in our general direction over the code breakage issue
> where a project investment using Lazarus/FPC may end up a QA and
> maintenance nightmare. This view is shared by many of my colleagues
> who can't understand why I'm still using a beta ide on a "dinosaur
> language from the 80's". How's that for an insult? I agree with
> Graeme's posting that this has become a public relations issue... an
> obvious one. I'm also starting to see it as a squandered opportunity
> to displace the bloated languages on the Linux platform where fast,
> compact and self contained Lazarus apps should be a dominant presence
> right now... today.
>
> Yes, Lazarus is an open source project, people work on it for fun and
> there is no business entity that is promoting it. Lazarus has been
> active for around 10 years and FPC even longer then that. The Linux OS
> also started to emerge during this same timeframe with the same type
> of development model. To compare, Linux is now running corporate
> datacenters around the world... and Lazarus is still in beta with very
> few public applications deployed.
>
> I don't think a case can be made that the project isn't ready for
> 1.0... after 10 years of development and it's current, impressive
> state, of course it is. The next steps are to actively discuss the
> finer points of what "ready" is and to set a definite goal to achieve
> it. As I see it, this will involve a feature set freeze, establishing
> bug thresholds *and* making a reasonably sincere commitment to not
> break compatibility at the source level past the version 1.0 release
> that will hopefully be shared by the FPC team.
>
> A version 1.0 milestone is crucial and much more then a given feature
> set and minimized bug list. It also conveys the idea of stability and
> confidence to anyone who may be interested in investing their time to
> learn the language, use the tools and create something of lasting
> value.  If we don't start building that confidence in the larger
> community pretty soon, this project will continue to be viewed as a
> "toy" and will eventually become a relic to a once great development
> paradigm.

I agree with you, when look Lazarus from bussiness point of view. There must 
be "freeze" at some point, and developers should respect it.
It does not matter is it 0.9.28 or 1.0 (better to see 1.0 definitelly), but in 
case 0.9.28 (or 1.0) there must be full compatibility all the time 
(0.9.28.XX - or 1.0XX) and for such thing we need more developers who will 
maintain stable release (1.fixing bugs 2.adding new features without breaking 
compatibility).
I'll vote for 0.9.30 -> becomes 1.0rc with feature freeze (no interface 
changes) . Paul already mentioned what features are expected at that point 
(frames, docking etc).

zeljko