[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Marco van de Voort]

On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 04:46:57PM -0700, Tom Lisjac wrote:
> 
> Everyone agrees that Lazarus and FPC are unique, highly capable and
> excellent in their current releases and it's clear that the project is
> in a highly advanced state. Volunteers are needed now more then ever
> to fix bugs and clean up the howto's, code examples and obsolete wiki
> tutorials. Support funding would also be encouraging to the people
> that have worked so tirelessly on the IDE and compiler for over a
> decade.

This blurb is copied and paste for every message that asks for something.

It means nothing. No single feature, action or release ever brought in masses of
new users, funding or code, despite they were always promised.

Today it is a 1.0 label , tomorrow it is GIT, yet the day after it is garbage
collection, threaded for loops, dynamic linking etc.

And all this discussion and hurrying eats into the real work.

> Graeme started this thread with a question about plans for stability.
> It hasn't been answered, but is still relevant because the project is
> so close to being production ready. If it continues to be perceived as
> "almost stable", many potential volunteers will continue to hold back
> and "wait a little longer" until it is..

The trouble is it is hard to fight against perceptions. Once a 1.0 is rushed
out, and some bad forum posts appear in some codegear forum, whipped up by
some old faithfulls that it didn't work for their code and "Lazarus is
almost htere, but not just yet", it all restarts again.

The only universal truth is that if people want feature X they should work
on feature X, X beign stability, bugfixing dynamic libs and whatsoever, and
not try to hinge their contribution on some magical state or feature Y.

> that in this thread. After all, who wants to convert components,
> revise examples, rewrite tutorials and update webpages that will
> quickly become obsolete and need fixing over and over again?

Who wants to dedicate a next year to a rushed 1.0 that will solve nothing?

I don't really believe that the hordes will magically come after a rushed 1.0, and
most experience FPC/Lazarus devels seem to agree. Yet we are having this
same discussion over and over again, after every newbie from the Delphi
world has the illusion he can manage the project better. (conveniently
wrapped in a 1000 line summary, without any contribution).

The same is the GIT introduction. Several people that know the FPC/Lazarus
workflow have played with GIT and said it was not ready yet.

Several GIT proponents have been asked again and again to come up with more
details, study the workflow, and suggest how it might be adapted, and then
start some pilot project. However, all we got was "what is good for Linus is
good enough for you", and vague descriptions how to fix GIT problems with
manual procedures (for stuff htat SVN does automatically like lineending
correction), and a hurriedly set up mirror.
 
> So how can the core team continue to enjoy working on new stuff while
> attracting developers and volunteers who want a "stable" tool that
> they can confidently promote to their employers and use for personal
> projects?

Because I'm now in about the 25th or already 30th likewise discussion in the
years that I'm coremember, and they all turn out the same:

- a large thread in the maillist archives
- a lot of lost time.
- Changes initiated after the disucssion are mostly abandonned since the
 promised hordes don't come, and core is supposed to maintain it
 indefinitely again, yet another burden.
- A lot of time lost for core.

Yet, in this very thread it is clear that users are too lazy to read a 2
page SVN tutorial to get involved in development. This is crazy!

> There's been a considerable amount of time and energy invested by a
> lot smart people in this and previous threads,

That is the exact problem. Much talk, much requirements to do something set,
and nothing done.