On 4 June 2010 16:16, Michael Van Canneyt wrote: > > Converting 2 million lines because they broke compatibility is NOT funny, > and will - in all likelihood - cost us a lot of money. >
Rightly so, but why? Because you got no prior warning of the scale of the change, no end-user input was sought, no time to prepare. So you were forced to follow the "wait and see what we get on release day" approach - this is terrible!. This is exactly why I think open-source software is so great. The community gets a chance to be involved, and you can see long before what is changing and get prepared as the changes progress. And with the community involvement (more eyes on the code), better designs could be discussed (like in the case of FPC's Unicode support compared to Delphi's). So even though there might be a code-breaking change - the effect should never be has harsh as what you get from Embarcadero. You would have much longer to prepare your code for the change. So in the end the code-breaking change (to currently maintained code) is not so bad. The FPC Unicode implementation is such an example. It's not 100% Delphi compatible, because FPC came up with a better design - the covers more platforms and solutions. So non-compatibility is justified. I just ask that other code changes be judged with the same open minded approach. -- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _______________________________________________ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
