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. I personally have run out of options in what to recommend to such new clients/developers. The supposed to be stable "fixes" branch is broken. The "trunk" branch is changing to much for corporate on independent developers to use in commercial environment because it's often broken after a svn update or features are partially implement (expected from a trunk branch I supposed). But that leaves no real stable working version of Lazarus! I just feel there seems to be no clear direction or goal in the Lazarus project any more. What was the initial goal? To be Delphi compatible? But to which version: Delphi 7, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010? Seriously you guys don't think you can keep up with a commercial funded company and still implement your own unique features. Lazarus needs it's own set of goals, not the goals of Embarcadero. And things are just going to get worse when Embarcadero releases their cross-platform compiler and toolkit in a year or so. Also, what's the state of Mantis bug reports? The statistics pages in Mantis is hidden from general users (we don't have access). What is the ratio of bugs being fixed to bugs being reported? What is the turn-around time of submitting a patch to having it integrated in the mainstream code? What was the turn-around time 2 years ago - has the Lazarus project improved? What is the year-on-year or even month-on-month count of outstanding bugs? What is the count of reported bugs not even being acknowledged? Why is all this information hidden? Can we please get this information in the public eye so we can have a clear idea if Lazarus project is getting worse or better. After all, Lazarus is meant to be a "open" source project - I would have hoped that relates to the bug tracker status too, but it doesn't. Make no mistake, after all I have said, I still think Lazarus IDE is a great developer tool. It's just a bit harder to find a stable working build. We have resorted to to maintaining our own stable branch in our company by cherry-picking select commits as we need them, but this requires even more time. I just feel Lazarus project overall has NO goal! And a project with no overall goal has no future. It's not living up to what it could be. As a community member I thought it my duty to raise all these concerns. I want Lazarus to live up to it's full potential - only thing is, nobody knows what that is. :-( -- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
