[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Henry Vermaak]

On 5 March 2010 21:59, Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> [...If you are easily offended to what I normally write, stop reading now...]
>
>
> 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).

Welcome to the world of software, our job is chasing moving targets :(
 You'd probably find that many people here don't really care about
people switching, but it will help the community and have more people
that can contribute patches (or probably just file more bug reports).

> 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". 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. :-(

You need to forget about gtk1, I'd be surprised if you can actually
find the libs on your distro.  It's deprecated.  Regarding the
slower/faster thing, it's like comparing apples with pears, seriously.

> 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. 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. 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.

One comment I can make about this is that a different development
model would probably work better (with managers pulling trees).  Then
you can ask the manager to pull and have more real code and patches
discussed (perhaps on a separate list).  I have a suspicion that
manpower is the real issue here, sadly.

Also, re compatibility of components, this is just the reality of any
evolving system (see for example kernel drivers, if you don't maintain
them, you lose them).

> 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!

If we have people actively requesting patches to be picked and perhaps
more discussion of this on list.  But it all takes time.  Release
often, I guess, but that's hard for such a small team.

> I just feel there seems to be no clear direction or goal in the
> Lazarus project any more. What was the initial goal? To be Delphi
> compatible? But to which version: Delphi 7, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2007,
> Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010? Seriously you guys don't think you can keep
> up with a commercial funded company and still implement your own
> unique features. Lazarus needs it's own set of goals, not the goals of
> Embarcadero. And things are just going to get worse when Embarcadero
> releases their cross-platform compiler and toolkit in a year or so.

The initial goal was delphi 7, but lazarus is a lot more advanced in
certain respects (imho).  It is true that fpc will probably be playing
catch up with language features, but a lot if it is sugar.  Can you be
a bit more specific about features you think lazarus is chasing that
it shouldn't?

Henry