[Lazarus] Making sense of Lazarus snapshots

[Martin]

  On 10/08/2010 22:51, Frank Church wrote:
> When I look at the Lazarus snapshots page I see:
>
> Lazarus
> Lazarus fixes
> Lazarus 09.28.3
> Lazarus 09.28.3 fixes
> Lazarus fixes+ fpc 2.4.0
> Lazarus + fpc 2.4.0
> Lazarus + fpc 2.4.3
>
> Does that mean that the current version of Lazarus is 0.9.29 using fpc 
> 2.5.1, with backports to 0.9.28 as fixes, as well us code being 
> modified to be backwardly compatible with fpc 2.4.0 and 2.4.3?
>
> Is version 0.9.28 being actively developed for compatibility with fpc 
> 2.5.1, ie is the main compiler for 0.9.28 fpc 2.5.1?

I can see fixes only in combination with 0.9.28.3
"fixes" simply indicates, that only selected fixes were added after the 
last release.

You can deduct most from the version number:
- even numbers are releases. they are fixed, do not change.
- odd numbers  indicate development version. The same version may be a 
different product on any day
- The 4th digit being odd, indicates "fixes" 0.9.28.ODD

The last release was 0.9.28.2. Which was released with fpc 2.2.4 (but 
may work with newer fpc too)
0.9.28(.0) was the previous release.
Since 0.9.28 and 0.9.28,2 are released, they do no longer change.

0.9.28.3 is the fixes version of this release. It contains selected 
fixes from the active development (sometimes also new features). If I 
read the SVN log correctly it was last updated in March.

0.9.29 is the active development, it changes daily, often more than one 
change on a day. It has all new features, all bug fixes that have been 
done, and may also have new bugs (happens sometimes). And it should 
compile with 2.5.1 (at least it does for me)

As for the fpc version. The download page offers selected combinations. 
You can do separate downloads and use the desired version of Lazarus 
with a different fpc version. So long as it is at elast the minimum 
required.

Martin