On 03 Oct 2011, at 16:06, Alexander Klenin wrote:
There is, again, a continuum between careful development and
stangation.
While acknowledging great work that FPC team has done on the former,
I'd venture to say that is came uncomfortably close to the latter.
I think http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_Trunk looks quite
good.
Apart from that, I agree with the sentiment that it does not make
sense trying to stuff everything and the kitchen sink under the FPC
umbrella. Everything that's distributed that way automatically becomes
the responsibility of the "core" developers of the day, and that
collection of source code has grown much faster than the number of
people maintaining it (and in a number of cases, maintainers have also
disappeared). So distributing packages separately generally indeed
makes much more sense for everyone (more flexibility for the
maintainer, less responsibility and stagnation risk for the FPC
project due to additional responsibilities).
And in this particular case, there does remain the fact that the
cpstrnew adaptations are far from finished and that part of the
functionality in this "utf-8 package" may well become part of the RTL
or FCL. If there is then also a separate utf-8 package used by
fpvectorial, and possibly also by user programs, you can bet that
people would (understandably) complain if functionality is then
removed from this utf-8 package to prevent code and maintenance
duplication.
That's also why Florian mentioned the branch: does not cause wrong
expectations (users won't start using that package), the code is
available in svn and therefore it can be used for finishing the
cpstrnew work where appropriate, and before/when merging to trunk we
can first look at what should be removed or changed to prevent
duplication of functionality. But again: as a non-FPC package you
indeed avoid this overhead and the uncertainty that when the time
merging arrives, you won't be able to merge everything you want.
Jonas
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