[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Thierry Coq]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> ...
>   
As a user, I'm very happy the Lazarus team is providing an alternative 
to Delphi, on top of FPC. I'm starting to use Lazarus to make small 
utilities, where the GUI needs are not so great. The compiler and basic 
GUI are quite good now, I'm just waiting for the famous Lazarus 1.0 now.

I would gladly contribute 100 EUR to BUY such a product and help 
maintain the product.

>
> 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.
>   
As a user, I don't understand the team structure, now how can I report a 
bug or contribute to its correction? This should be clearer, in my opinion.
> 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!
>   
We absolutely need a stable 1.xx version to promote Lazarus in the 
corporate world, plus a team dedicated to its maintenance, somehow.

In any case, thank you all for this,

Best regards,
Thierry