[Lazarus] Enhance Macro usage by making it easier to find

[Vincent Snijders]

Even though it is Friday again, I will try to respond without getting too emotional.

Graeme Geldenhuys schreef:
> Vincent Snijders het geskryf:
>> I only want feature requests that stand a reasonable chance to be
>> implemented before version 3.0 (due after 2025).
> 
> And who decides the fate of such feature requests? 

He who implements, decides. This is open source, you know ;-). And with all those 
distributed SCM systems, core developers stand no change impeding feature requests, 
if there is a developer who implements them. :-)

> If you did not
> notice, I first posted the idea here in the mailing list to be discussed
> and get a feeling of what other developers think. I made it clear that I
> do not know how others feel about this feature, but that I thought it
> would be helpful. 

I have no objection to a feature request, but a feature request without somebody who 
wants to implement is.

> I did not want to "pollute" the Mantis tracker with
> features only I want.
> 
> Mattias and Michael commented, without explicitly saying: NO THIS IS
> RUBBISH!  So based on their responses, I understood it that others also
> feel this could be beneficial, but none of use have the time to
> implement it right this minutes. 


> Hence, the Feature Request in Mantis -
> so the idea is documented and not forgotten.
> 

Still in Mantis it will be forgotten is my experience. Adding them to mantis has no 
additional value. So http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Feature_Ideas is as good.

> BTW: This is the first time I hear that Lazarus developers do NOT look
> at the Feature Request section in Mantis. It's news to me.
> 

I can only speak for myself and how I see it used. Other Lazarus developers have to 
tell what they do with feature requests in the wiki. Take for example "Using 
navigation keys in a form at design time" : 
http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=1738. Yesterday Paul committed some changes 
to implement this feature. I asked if he had seen this issue in mantis, he said no, 
but a colleague of him wanted it to be implemented very much. He didn't even know 
about it. If I would not remember it, I bad it would be there for a year or more, 
until somebody noticed that this was implemented a long time ago.

> 
>> You can. But IMHO this one is a bad example of such a feature
>> request.
> 
> In your opinion maybe. By like I said, who decides what is good or bad?

Note the difference: This discussion is about what is a good or bad feature request. 
It is about what is a good or bad place to document a feature request. With assignee 
-> bug tracker, without assignee: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Feature_Ideas

Example: a good feature request for the bug tracker is: 
http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=14618
Dmitry is maintainer of this component and the issue can be assigned to him.

As a Lazarus developer who uses the bug tracker a lot and wants to keep it 
manageable, I may not decide about it, but I fancy the idea I can make suggestions 
about its usage.

> At least I posted my idea in the mailing list - to be discussed. You
> might not have noticed, but I do this often before I report features
> requests or bugs in mantis.
> 

That is good, keep doing so. I read all those emails. I am sorry I could not respond 
between 11:26, the first answer to your feature request and 12:36. At that time I 
hoped "I'll simply add it as a feature request" meant adding it in the wiki. I was 
simply too late.

> 
>> I fear I offend people, if I close this issue with "No change
>> required", "Won't fix" (it is not true, patches are excepted).
> 
> Why not simply allow the creator of the feature request or bug report to
> delete their own reports.
> 

I would be reluctant to that, maybe only for issues not yet resolved. It may cause 
valuable information to be lost. In svn log messages we often refer to issues in the 
bug tracker.

Vincent