[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 7 March 2010 14:21, Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
>
> The downside to this is: there is also a lot less functionality.
> A simpler product is by definition easier to maintain.

Being a one-man-band, things take a while to be implemented -
especially if it's not the only thing you are working on. Looking at
what v0.6 (last release of fpGUI) had and what v0.7 (soon to be
released) will have, there is a huge amount of new components and
features. v0.8 will have drag-n-drop, full clipboard support and MDI
window type support, so fpGUI is becoming more feature complete.

To give you an example of what I meant by easier to maintain. For the
last 6 months I have pretty much 99% of my time developing under Linux
- that included adding new features and components to fpGUI. Just the
other day I though I better test my work under Windows. Fired up the
VM session and even to my surprise, everything worked 100% like it did
under Linux. That's the benefit I'm talking about - more common code
reduces the amount of bugs and maintenance.


> And as soon as someone says 'I want native look and feel', you're

That's what the themes are for. :) As for the "feel" - I haven't had a
user complain yet. Most components (buttons, menus, comboboxes, grids
etc.) all work like the users where used to under native Windows
applications. So clearly it's just developers that have an issue with
the "feel", not the common user.


> If I was planning Lazarus' future (for clarity: I am not), I would lay out
> for the LCL:

See, now that is the type of thing I'm talking about. Have some goal
for the LCL, and try and reach that goal. Currently, it's just from
version to version, adding more features, introducing regression bugs
and having no stable version of the IDE or LCL. Simply not ideal, and
very hard to promote to others.


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/