[fpc-other] Re: [fpc-devel] Interface scope incompatibility with Delphi

[Henry Vermaak]

On 11 November 2010 14:31, Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Op 2010-11-11 15:32, Henry Vermaak het geskryf:
>> obviously, or do you think that relying on undocumented behaviour is a
>> good idea?  Look what happened with flashplayer in fedora with the
>> current memcpy fiasco.
>
> Sorry, I don't know about that problem. I've never used Fedora.

http://lwn.net/Articles/414467/rss

>> From over here it looks like you are killing your business ventures by
>> basing the implementation on dangerous assumptions.
>
> Well, in the case of Delphi, and the fact that it (this interface behaviour
> I discussed) has been working for use for just over a decade is not bad
> going, and good enough for me (and clearly for other ISV's too). Having to
> tweak your code once every decade is not a considered a problem.

If a "tweak" can fix this if Delphi changes their implementation, why
don't you just tweak it now so it works in fpc, too?  Because this is
much deeper than just tweaking.  They've based their implementation on
undocumented features.

>> Btw, why this cross platform installer?
>
> Simply because what is out there is rather crap. To big 3rd party
> dependencies (a Java VM, large Qt libraries, large GTK libraries etc), way
> too expensive, doesn't always support console and GUI etc. My solution
> works on any system with or without a GUI. And if the latter, just a bare
> mininum GUI (in the case of Linux/Unix - just minimal X11 setup) is needed.
> It's XML driven, scriptable, customizable and comes with a graphical
> Install Builder too - designed for the Free Pascal developer, but not
> limited to them. My installer favours the GUI (but doesn't shun console
> needs), so Linux desktop users can finally have single file setups and
> simply the "next, next, finish" experience Windows users have had for so long.

Will you integrate with existing package managers?  If not, how will
you deal with dependencies, upgrades, config files?  Package managers
make this easy, installing software isn't just about copying files
around.

Henry