[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Flávio Etrusco]

>
> This is a continuation of my issues regarding the tab-type components.
> Lazarus team doesn't have enough manpower or resources to maintain
> duplicate components, chase a moving target which has dedicated
> developers and corporate money backing (Delphi), and still implement
> it's own unique features and be a competitive product (or a project
> Delphi developers would want to switch too).

IMVHO the tab-type components issue is a non-issue.

> This worrying issues is more visible lately than ever before. I'm
> starting to worry that Lazarus team is trying so hard to catch a
> moving target (delphi) and trying to implement many fancy features,
> that nothing actually ends up becoming stable or compatible for long.
> The old English saying holds true here: "Jack of all trades, but
> master of none".

I don't see Lazarus currently trying to catch up with Delphi, actually
my impression is it's continuously diverging from this faith, and
following it's own way.

> Look how long GTK1 took to become stable, and just
> when it did, Lazarus switched to LCL-GTK2, which is still marked as
> beta quality, has slower performance than GTK1 - so here we start all
> over again. Not to mention that GTK1 is now often broken too, so we
> can't even switch back if we wanted too. :-(

Yeah, again. GTK2 is in itself much slower than GTK1, and I don't see
a noticeable difference between LCL and native-C or gtk++ anymore. I
for one wouldn't certainly develop for gtk1; it's simply a dead
platform.

> I have also been seeing more and more developers complaining that
> their patches are not even being looked at - the core team seem to be
> preoccupied with other stuff. Yes I know we are all busy and have REAL
> jobs, but then give more developers write access and delicate work to
> those developers.

I guess Mattias fired three or four of his clones - didn't you, too?
;-) -, maybe this is being felt.
It's a bit frustrating waiting for your patches to be analyzed, yes,
but rushing svn access for unexperienced developers or people not
completely familiar with the project's mindset isn't going to help, on
the contrary it's a sure recipe for the "downward spiral".

> The "fixes" branch has been totally unusable for
> months because the form designer is broken (you cannot move/resize
> components) and nothing is being done regarding that - even though it
> has been reported numerous times.

No word on it.

> Then there is the common known fact
> that if you port a component or implement your own component, it's
> guaranteed to not work or compile one or two Lazarus "minor.minor"
> versions later (I explicitly mention minor.minor because Lazarus
> doesn't increase major or minor versions - not it my lifetime at
> least). So this means developers (which are also busy) must keep
> fixing old/existing work.
> Then developers like myself, which try and promote FPC and Lazarus IDE
> in the corporate environment, hoping to catch a break and get some
> corporate sponsorship for Lazarus, is having an endless battle. I
> personally have run out of options in what to recommend to such new
> clients/developers. The supposed to be stable "fixes" branch is
> broken. The "trunk" branch is changing to much for corporate on
> independent developers to use in commercial environment because it's
> often broken after a svn update or features are partially implement
> (expected from a trunk branch I supposed). But that leaves no real
> stable working version of Lazarus!

It's a problem of the approach taken for the LCL: the widgetsets are
the real moving targets here.
Maybe if we completed the fpgui bridge.. ;-)
I'd say Lazarus is almost as stable as it has ever been, but maybe
it's still not stable enough for corporate tastes.

(...)

Best regards,
Flávio