[Lazarus] What are "widgets" in lazarus?

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Darius Blaszyk wrote:
>> FPC and Lazarus are, by and large, pretty simple to build. Middleware such as SDL can be far more difficult because it can turn out to have a cascade of requirements, and in the past I've found things like TrueType to be particularly painful.
> 
> Hi Mark,
> 
> Can you explain what your problems were with truetype? I'm using freetype for font rendering in the opengl backend but so far there were no main issues with the freetype bindings, apart from some issues (bugs?) in the fontmanager. 

I'm working from memory here, and it was a few years ago so I guess I 
knew even less than I do now :-)

The problem was that I was having to graft something onto a stable 
server with a slightly-older version of kernel, libraries and so on than 
the app's developers had used. ./configure failed and I ended up having 
to install some graphical middleware (I forget the exact detail) which 
then announced it didn't like the version of TrueType on the system. I 
installed a private TrueType specifically for that app, and that 
expressed a strong preference for some fundamental library upgrades.

I've had comparable problems when trying to build Mozilla derivatives 
(e.g. SeaMonkey): fortunately this wasn't critical but I got the 
impression that the only way to do it was to start off with the same 
distro and version that the developers were using, at least as a 
reference system.

All of that is something which a developer familiar with the platform 
and libraries should be able to work around fairly easily. But in my 
opinion if part of the idea of fpGUI is to have a version of the LCL 
which will run on almost anything without preconditions then eliminating 
as much "middleware" as possible would be a worthwhile exercise.

After all, the purpose of installing Lazarus is to be able to use it to 
write application programs, not as an exercise in tweaking low-level 
libraries and symlinks.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]