[Lazarus] Anchoring buttons (or other graphical elements)

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Jürgen Hestermann schrieb:

> And second that was my experience too. But I just tried it again on a 
> fresh project and now suddenly vertical alignment behave the same! This 
> "eratic" (unpredictable, at least to me) behaviour was the reason I 
> wanted to look into the documentation but it did not make it clearer but 
> more obscure. It seems I have to invest much more time into this than I 
> wanted...

Anchoring and child-sizing IMO doesn't fit together nicely. Anchoring is 
a critical feature by itself, because it can end up in loops or other 
unwanted effects, if not repaired properly by the property setters.

I really don't wonder about inconsistent behaviour of these features, 
after an attempt to remove these features from the controls, and putting 
them into an separate layout manager. In this attempt I found out *in 
how many places* these features deserve special handling, so that the 
risk for broken code is high, in both the existing implementation and in 
every later update. The interdependencies never have been researched, 
and consequently also the documentation is complicated and incomplete. 
Some parts of the described features look nice, but only for themselves. 
In their entirety they opened up a can of worms, that is near 
unmanagable now.

So I'd prefer a general layout manager interface instead a bunch of 
built-in layout features, but I know that this never will come. But in 
contrast I'm sure that I'll be flamed for that extravagant opinion ;-)

DoDi