[Lazarus] Cocoa maintainer and submitting patches

[Zoë Peterson]

As we're winding up preparations for our upcoming release, we've been 
collecting all of our outstanding changes relative to Lazarus trunk and 
splitting them into patches.  Outside some that are specific to us, we 
currently have about 130 distinct patches, half of which are for 
LCLCocoa, with the remainder being a mix of LCL core, LCLQt5, or 
components.  Some of those would require significant effort to develop 
example apps and bug write-ups for, which would be hard to justify if 
they're unlikely to be merged.

Dmitry hasn't been actively maintaining the Cocoa widgetset for quite a 
while now, and my understanding is that he's stepped down. Alextp has 
been pinging me on a issues that impact him, but I'm not currently a 
member of the Lazarus team.  I think I can do good job of evaluating 
patches, but macOS has already taken up significantly more of my time 
than I can justify, and I've already had to reduce my Cocoa efforts 
here.  David Jenkins is our primary macOS/Linux developer and did at one 
point have LCLCarbon commit access, but he's never been very active in 
that capacity.  He doesn't want maintainership himself either, but we 
can have him help, especially if it helps get our patches merged.

One concern I have with either of us is that an explicit design goal of 
our app is that it feel as macOS-native as possible, and that has 
involved considerable work to bypass the LCL in various ways.  We don't 
use the LCL common dialogs, for example, so if those break, we're less 
likely to notice.  We also don't use Lazarus on Windows, and David 
doesn't have any significant Win32 experience, so cross-widgetset 
functionality that we need on macOS/Linux could easily conflict with 
things that the LCL needs elsewhere.

Has there been any movement to replace Dmitry?  Are there any other 
developers who've expressed interest or even shown significant knowledge 
on the LCLCocoa innards?

-- 
Zoë Peterson
Scooter Software