On 2026-04-06 13:42, Kostas Michalopoulos via fpc-devel wrote:
It also leads to a more buggy compiler though. FPC has great
stability and i think not making a release until the compiler
is stable enough is a good thing for end users.
Respectfully, I disagree that time-based releases inherently lead to
more bugs. In fact, the current 5-year gap since the 3.2.2 release is
causing a different kind of "instability" for framework developers and
end-users.
When the "main" branch hoards fixes, features, and updated OS APIs
(Windows unit, BaseUnix, fcl-passrc, macOS improvements) for half a
decade, it puts external developers in an impossible position. We cannot
reasonably ask our users to switch to an in-development branch for
production work, yet staying on a 5-year-old "stable" release means we
are forced to maintain a mountain of internal workarounds for bugs that
have long since been fixed in FPC's repository.
The Benefits of Time-Based Releases (as seen in OpenJDK, LLVM, etc.):
* Predictability: Framework authors can plan their roadmaps knowing
exactly when they can deprecate old workarounds.
* Reduced "Fixes" Overhead: With a 6-month cycle, the need for complex
backporting to "fixes" branches diminishes. If a feature misses a
window, it's only 6 months away, not 5+ years.
* Better Feedback Loop: More frequent releases mean more users testing
the "new" code in real-world scenarios sooner, rather than a massive
"big bang" release that is guaranteed to have regressions due to the
sheer volume of 5 years of accumulated changes.
* Automation over Manual Labour: The "man-power" argument is real, but
the solution is to automate the release engineering process (CI/CD,
test-suite validation) so that a release becomes a "non-event" rather
than a heroic manual effort.
Kostas, you mentioned you use the main branch daily and have commit
access. That is a luxury many of our users don't have. For those of us
trying to build an ecosystem on top of FPC, the lack of a formal release
makes the compiler feel stagnant to the outside world, even if the
repository is active.
I am more than happy to contribute missing APIs for the Windows unit or
fix broken constants I discovered in BaseUnix, but having to wait 5+
years before other developers can benefit from those contributions is
simply not right. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that five years
is an eternity in software development.
We don't need every release to be a "major" milestone. We just need the
"stable" baseline to move forward at a pace that matches the modern
development landscape. If we don't address this, we risk fragmenting the
community further.
Regards,
Graeme
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