[Lazarus] Cocoa maintainer and submitting patches

[Maxim Ganetsky]

12.04.2023 21:57, Zoë Peterson via lazarus пишет:
> 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.

High quality patches, especially with good descriptions, will be merged 
indeed.

> 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 

Unfortunately, yes, due to lack of time.

> 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 

Probably, it is time to become a member?

> 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.

BTW, a good start will be reviewing Cocoa-related merge requests, for 
example:

https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/lazarus/lazarus/-/merge_requests/117
https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/lazarus/lazarus/-/merge_requests/118

> 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.

This can always be discussed with other developers, your concerns in 
this regard are not unique.

> Has there been any movement to replace Dmitry?  Are there any other 

Currently we don't have any Cocoa developers in the team. Historically I 
merged Dmitry's work on Cocoa since migration to Git, but note that I 
cannot even test these changes because I don't have a Mac.

> developers who've expressed interest or even shown significant knowledge 
> on the LCLCocoa innards?

Only you and David. :)

-- 
Best regards,
  Maxim Ganetsky                  mailto:ganmax at narod.ru