On 10/10/12, Bart <[email protected]> wrote: > But then again, it would be nice for committers to know if extending > an LCL component beyound it's Delphi's counterpart is considered to be > "officially" OK (as long as the extension is considered usefull and > meaningfull and not just fullfilling the needs of very few people (and > there may be more criteria)). > > Getting back to the thread that stated this discussion: > I could spend time and energy on implementing an ImageList for > TDBNavigator (which Delphi doesn't have, and which maybe usefull for > more than just a few people). But i would then become very frustrated > if the patch was rejected because of "Delphi incompatibility".
I think ImageList for TDBNavigator would be good. At work we searched for a way to change those glyphs in Delphi because they now use strange colors. So, go ahead! The Delphi compatible LCL components have been extended already in many ways. I don't see any core developer being against it. A practical issue only has been that LCL was not ready and it made more sense to get the basic functionality working first before extending it much. The focus may change when things mature. My personal opinion is that both the IDE and the libraries must innovate and go beyond the Delphi equivalents to be successful. No project ever has become successful by ONLY imitating something else. On the other hand, backwards (and Delphi) compatibility is important. Most people would not be interested in this project otherwise. Like with any library there is a fine balance between those things but I don't see any fundamental problem. Sometimes a patch gets ignored for a long time which is bad of course. The core devels are busy or their interest happens to be somewhere else. Bart, you have commit rights for LCL. Your judgement is trusted. Please use your super-powers. :) More personal thoughts: Lazarus starts to be so big that it is more like an umbrella project. Libraries, components, LCL widgetset bindings etc. can be added without disturbing the rest of the system. A whole new GUI library could be added and the designer could be adjusted for it. Yes, Mattias has made a proof-of-concept designer extension for it. So, things are flexible. Anything can be done. And more: I think this is a sweet spot in Lazarus development. Some diligent developers have put huge amounts of time and effort without getting much positive feedback. Now the results are showing, Lazarus is very usable and gets more attention. I sense respect and trust between developers, not big egos as somebody wanted to explain. The areas of response got divided rather naturally. For example I have improved the IDE's usability, nobody told me to do so and I didn't "decide" to do so. It just happened. My experience in life says that things cannot work so nicely for long. Lazarus gets more popular, more developers join. At some point some developers start pulling to opposite directions. But, let's not think of that now ... Hmmm... What was the problem? I don't see any big problems. More high quality code would be needed, that is a problem of course. Juha -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
