[Lazarus] svn update can't be compiled

[Juha Manninen]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:22 PM John Landmesser via lazarus
<lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
> For Manjaro (ArchLinux) i installed fpc-svn and fpc-src-svn from AUR
> with yay and now i have a running:
>
> Lazarus 2.1.0 r62669 FPC 3.3.1 x86_64-linux-gtk2

I also run Manjaro Linux but I didn't know that AUR has FPC trunk.
I would download it if I didn't build it already myself.
Manjaro's official repo always has the latest versions of everything.
It is super nice compared to repos of Debian + its derivatives for
example.
However it doesn't help with FPC because they release so seldom.
Ancient FPC 3.0.4 is still the latest.

This is almost unbearable. Issue #30306 was an important compatibility
feature/fix. It got fixed some 3 and half years ago. When FPC 3.2
finally comes out, it may well be 4 years. Insanity! More and more
people must build FPC from sources.
It hogs resources also from FPC devels. They have an endless merge
exercise. Bug fixes from past years must be dug up and merged to 3.2
branch. Still the release will be outdated already when it finally
comes out, because trunk has collected so much new stuff during the
years.

Other FOSS projects have faced the same problem in past. They
typically fixed it by adjusting their release policy. Release early,
release
often. A principle of "release when it is ready" is doomed. No
substantial SW is "ready" ever. There will always be things to fix and
improve.

I hope there will be more forks of FPC project which concentrate on
release schedule.
Maybe one of them could replace FPC in distro repos. Maybe Lazarus can
switch to use it. Don't know ...

Juha