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

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Frank Church said:
> >
> > 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.

Correct more or less.

> They are cloud users in that sense as a lot of their data is stored
> and found in the Google cloud.

That is a stretch. Google is a mere index, like searchengines have for
decades. For me Cloud is still standarized SAAS

> Now if I want to engage them or involve them should I tell them 'It is my
> way or the highway'? 

Clouds is enterprise functionality and doesn't concern end-users at all.

Some clouds might have a public front that end-users know. But for them that
is social sites at best.

So maybe you should explain what you mean with clouds. At one side you are
talking about end-users, and on the other hand there is talk in this thread
about enterprise stuff like VMS for Amazon-EC1 cloud setups.

That some social sites that use clouds internally is an internal detail, and
doesn't concern users from the site.

> 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.

I like mailing lists for high volume. The noise is also generally lower. But
for small projects it hardly matters. 
 
> 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 has been mentioned before over and over again. Problem is that you try to
lower a hurdle that must be met with sooner or later anyway. Even if you
succeed. (it is easy to imagine a perfect product, it is harder to execute
it, and to keep doing it)

I think if a fraction of the time spent in such endeavour was to be put in
normal release engineering, it would be much more worthwhile.

And then I'm not even talking about the fragmented nature of the OSes that
you can actually freely PUT into a downloadable VM, and the various
distributions differing preferences for different VM technologies.

I think such solutions are great for the educational sector (where learning
is important, and managing the system and the exact target choice isn't),
and it is next to useless.

But give it a try. Maybe the combined groups of education sector and a few
starters is big enough to try. At least most of those users seems to
gravitate in the direction of Ubuntu, and maybe that is homogenous enough.
 
> 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.

People that stumble on the first roadblock will rarely become experienced
developers. (while they exist, but they are essentially people that tried as
teenagers, and effectively entirely restart later, e.g. when they are in
college, so you could discuss if the "first" attempt counts)

> For instance when Microsoft brings out their new products you can evaluate
> them directly in their cloud

Where can I run free Microsoft OS VMs ?

> or download a VM onto your local system for
> trial.

Only with a subscription to my best knowledge.
 
> A good example is a Drupal development VM at http://drupal.org/node/1032202and
> http://drupal.org/project/quickstart.

Drupal apps are accessed through a socket. The OS they run on matters lesss.
FPC/Lazarus apps typically not.

> 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.

I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Not new oranges and old
oranges. Moreover you have to take the audience of the project into account.

Programming environments don't fish in the same pond as say Facebook,
Farmville or even Microsoft do. Different target audience, different methods.
And different means of course. Since resources are always a problem, in any
opensource project.

> 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.

I do think widening the component set would be a good idea. But that should
be done beyond the current cores that are already overstretched. Do you
volunteer?