>> So what exactly is the Lazarus team afraid of in getting to v1.0? > > Since we think it's not ready for 1.0. > > Period.
The above comment seems to have stopped the previous Version 1.0 thread so I'm starting a new one with the hopes of hearing some additional comments and suggestions for achieving this goal. Of course the core compiler and ide development teams have done an awesome job over the many years that this project has been in process, but *many* others have also contributed their time and energy along the way and have an interest in seeing this project achieve a 1.0 release. Personally, I'd like to see Lazarus and FPC start to move forward and get the respect and larger following that they deserve... but with it's history and stalled 1.0, I don't blame any noob, experienced developer or business that makes an informed decision to avoid this toolchain. The problem I see is credibility... or "if we write a lot of code with Lazarus/FPC, will it be maintainable with the project in perpetual beta?". Delphi was stable from release 2 and code I developed with it in versions 2, 3, 4 and 5 continued to "just work" as I upgraded. Not the case here. I've been writing new code with Lazarus since 2002 and have learned that anything I write today is virtually guaranteed to be broken and uncompilable tomorrow because somebody thought it would be cool to change some aspect of the Object Pascal language or completely revise a library interface or function. It's become a lot of work to maintain the stuff I've already written and I'm reluctantly considering not using Lazarus for any new projects. Businesses laugh in our general direction over the code breakage issue where a project investment using Lazarus/FPC may end up a QA and maintenance nightmare. This view is shared by many of my colleagues who can't understand why I'm still using a beta ide on a "dinosaur language from the 80's". How's that for an insult? I agree with Graeme's posting that this has become a public relations issue... an obvious one. I'm also starting to see it as a squandered opportunity to displace the bloated languages on the Linux platform where fast, compact and self contained Lazarus apps should be a dominant presence right now... today. Yes, Lazarus is an open source project, people work on it for fun and there is no business entity that is promoting it. Lazarus has been active for around 10 years and FPC even longer then that. The Linux OS also started to emerge during this same timeframe with the same type of development model. To compare, Linux is now running corporate datacenters around the world... and Lazarus is still in beta with very few public applications deployed. I don't think a case can be made that the project isn't ready for 1.0... after 10 years of development and it's current, impressive state, of course it is. The next steps are to actively discuss the finer points of what "ready" is and to set a definite goal to achieve it. As I see it, this will involve a feature set freeze, establishing bug thresholds *and* making a reasonably sincere commitment to not break compatibility at the source level past the version 1.0 release that will hopefully be shared by the FPC team. A version 1.0 milestone is crucial and much more then a given feature set and minimized bug list. It also conveys the idea of stability and confidence to anyone who may be interested in investing their time to learn the language, use the tools and create something of lasting value. If we don't start building that confidence in the larger community pretty soon, this project will continue to be viewed as a "toy" and will eventually become a relic to a once great development paradigm. Thanks, -Tom -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
