On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 12:48:56PM -0500, Warren Postma wrote:
> My reason for complaining about Lazarus, and calling it "unusable", is that
> it suffers from worse usability defects (for what I want to use it for)
> than even the worst-ever versions of Delphi such as Delphi 2005.
One assumes here that a usability defects makes unusable per se. Which is
false. Usability defects can be painful, but if it can be worked around, it
can be still worth, depending on the gains.
And there we get into the usual pattern. Not everybodies expectations and
requirements are the same.
> If Lazarus could be as useful to me as Delphi 7, I would change my opinion
> from "nice little toy", to "amazing open source platform" pretty quickly.
Calling something a toy that people earn a living with, and other people
invested over a decade in, doesn't gain credit points. Nor will they listen
to your arguments.
> It's not that I hate Lazarus. I am deeply disappointed with it.
>
> All the whiners who stopped buying from CodeGear because of low quality,
> seem to have no problem with the low quality and the missing basic features
> of Lazarus that Delphi has had since Delphi 3.0.
Maybe they still miss features in D2007 that FPC had in 1.0, like Linux
support. Or multi-arch support like in 2.0 :-) Or generics, like in 2.2.
> You still can't install packages in Lazarus because the underlying FPC
> compiler lacks a runtime package system that could support a more
> delphi-like designtime/runtime packages installation system. Which by the
> way is the worst part of Delphi. Everyone complains about Delphi component
> installation headaches.
To be honest, I use D7 daily. Mostly because in my current job I have no
need for crosscompat atm. But in all my years of being a Delphi programmer,
I never used packages, and in some ways the Lazarus package system is better
(e.g. not having to manually add directories after installing a package, why
couldn't that be fixed in 11 versions of Delphi?)
> If Lazarus develops ANY package support whatsoever, I'll contribute and
> help make it better.
I only partially agree with Florian. I don't think a package system is
useless, but it sure is overrated, and the costs are tremendous. It's that
big hump that has stopped progres thusfar.
Your messages is typical in this regard, and by the way roughly something
that has been echoing in b.p.d.non-tech for about an year now as the lastest
last-straw whip to bash Lazarus.
Except the vague (and IMHO bogus) notation that packages is some silver
bullet that will make Lazarus right, it doesn't provide any clue about
usage patterns of packages, notion of implementation details, the question
if versioning in an open source projects won't be awfully hard (364 1/4 .FPL
packages every year. Minus one day when the server gets exchanged) etc etc.
And of course, nobody wants to help. It must be there first, and then the
same people will hold on to the next straw that FPC misses, something that
has been going on since Delphi times (including one person that persisted
that FPC is not there yet for ten years because it wouldn't compile his
16-bit asm)
Personally I would rank debugger way higher on my wishlist than packages.
> But until the FPC base compiler supports some kind of runtime package
> support, I see no point working on the top level GUI (lazarus). Maybe I
> should try to help the FPC team write package support. I don't know if I
> can, I have zero compiler-writing experience.
It's more linker knowlede btw. And we wouldn't mind. On a similar note,
recently a new resources system was committed, mostly created by an
interested external (thanks again Giulio)
But may I suggest you should actually have a look at Lazarus internals
beforehand, to really make sure you are not wasting time on a silver bullet
that turns out to be rust?
Another thing to think over is that if packages are less useful on non
windows platforms, how useful is the package then? It will be some time that
FPC beats Delphi in pure Delphi/win32 applications.
> Cross platform matters to me. So I'm not like most of the "lazarus haters".
> I'm not a hater at all. But I am a critic.
Uninformed critics are often awfully close to haters. Except the former
word it better. That's not necessarily a direct crack at you, but be careful
that you don't echo the tenure of that NG too much. It is rather simplistic.
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