[Lazarus] The perfect Linux distro for FPC and Lazarus development

[Frank Church]

On 8 March 2011 11:48, Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 10:57:12AM +0000, Frank Church wrote:
>
> > I think the real issue here is a lot of leading
> > Lazarus/FPC developers are comfortable and satisfied with their computer
> > setup and organization, which they probably have spent a long time
> > perfecting, pre cloud and pre Web 2.0 and all the other new fashioned
> webby
> > thingies.
>
> Before you judge other people's procedures and actions, at least build a
> case why it could be beneficial.
>
> The last attempt (the Netscape community server engine), didn't fare so
> well, because just one person knew it.
>
>

I am not judging other people's procedures and actions. For instance I was
involved in a discussion about people's preferences for forums rather than
mailing lists.

I prefer mailing lists and newsgroups because I got used to them a long time
ago before forums and discussion boards became popular, and I was using them
before a whole current generation of computer users were born. I also prefer
them because I get to keep a whole history about issues in the group on my
desktop or my remote IMAP account. A lot of new users who cut their teeth on
forums will prefer them as they only have to google to search for stuff they
need. They are cloud users in that sense as a lot of their data is stored
and found in the Google cloud.

Now if I want to engage them or involve them should I tell them 'It is my
way or the highway'? I can't, I have to adapt to their way of working. I
usually post to the mailing list to seek answers out of habit, though many
times I think I could post the question on forum.lazarus.freepascal.org and
get an answer. I would probably help others with their issues  a lot more if
I visited the forum, but with mailing lists I get all my mailing lists on
one page rather than having to flit from web page to web page for every
topic I am interested in.

In short I think the bar to Lazarus/FPC involvement or experimentation is
rather high and the set patterns of the more experienced developers are an
issue here. Rather than tell a user with a problem to do this or do that,
they could be pointed to a stock VM with a good set of components
preinstalled, and well configured with debugging options, good IDE settings
etc, all well documented.

It also means that when users have problems they are usually working from
the same base line and locating their issues would be much quicker.

That way they could get productive quicker and have more time in turn to
contribute, and probably leave the more experienced developers more time to
improve the Lazarus core.

For instance when Microsoft brings out their new products you can evaluate
them directly in their cloud, or download a VM onto your local system for
trial.

A good example is a Drupal development VM at http://drupal.org/node/1032202and
http://drupal.org/project/quickstart. Lazarus would so much easier if there
was such stuff readily available for it. try the following searches in
Google, "vm site:drupal.org", "vm site:freepascal.lazarus.org" and check the
result count. I think there are too many* grizzled, battle-hardened, old
school,  command line veterans* in the Lazarus/FPC world, a group I will
admit to being a member of.

How many of the guys on this mailing list ever used HiSoft Pascal and C on
the Amstrad CPC or even heard of it.?

For instance I want to use tiopf (hint, hint) and update Indy as well, and
things are looking very daunting. The code itself may be difficult,
combining with mastering the IDE as well.

You now know the reason for my long-winded rant/gripe [?]

I am now off to download the above mentioned VM and add Lazarus to it as I
need both development environments.

Rant vented, bye.

PS Sorry for hijacking the thread.


--
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-- 
Frank Church

=======================
http://devblog.brahmancreations.com
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