On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
Hi,
[...If you are easily offended to what I normally write, stop reading now...]
This is a continuation of my issues regarding the tab-type components.
Lazarus team doesn't have enough manpower or resources to maintain
duplicate components, chase a moving target which has dedicated
developers and corporate money backing (Delphi), and still implement
it's own unique features and be a competitive product (or a project
Delphi developers would want to switch too).
This worrying issues is more visible lately than ever before. I'm
starting to worry that Lazarus team is trying so hard to catch a
moving target (delphi) and trying to implement many fancy features,
that nothing actually ends up becoming stable or compatible for long.
The old English saying holds true here: "Jack of all trades, but
master of none". Look how long GTK1 took to become stable, and just
when it did, Lazarus switched to LCL-GTK2, which is still marked as
beta quality, has slower performance than GTK1 - so here we start all
over again. Not to mention that GTK1 is now often broken too, so we
can't even switch back if we wanted too. :-(
I have also been seeing more and more developers complaining that
their patches are not even being looked at - the core team seem to be
preoccupied with other stuff. Yes I know we are all busy and have REAL
jobs, but then give more developers write access and delicate work to
those developers. The "fixes" branch has been totally unusable for
months because the form designer is broken (you cannot move/resize
components) and nothing is being done regarding that - even though it
has been reported numerous times. Then there is the common known fact
that if you port a component or implement your own component, it's
guaranteed to not work or compile one or two Lazarus "minor.minor"
versions later (I explicitly mention minor.minor because Lazarus
doesn't increase major or minor versions - not it my lifetime at
least). So this means developers (which are also busy) must keep
fixing old/existing work.
Then developers like myself, which try and promote FPC and Lazarus IDE
in the corporate environment, hoping to catch a break and get some
corporate sponsorship for Lazarus, is having an endless battle.
Nevertheless, there are plans to start commercial support for Lazarus.
The people who are currently playing with this idea will announce
this when the time is right for them, but I mention this now so
that you can see that Lazarus is taken serious, and that corporate
sponsorship is not an illusion.
I myself have recently also contracted development for Lazarus/FPC.
I would not do this if I didn't consider Lazarus a viable option.
Michael.
--
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