[fpc-pascal] Next major FPC release?

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Ben said:
> Is there any roadmap / time frame / estimate / thumb suck date / <???>
> for the next major FPC release - thus a release based on Trunk?

2.4.4 is already uploaded, and its release only waits for some server problems to be
sorted out.

2.6.0 is after that. Dates are difficult, specially with major releases, but
I'd guess somewhere late this year. (october-december)
 
> There are a few features in Trunk for some time now (ie: huge
> improvements to Interface usage and many more) that are not available in
> the latest stable 2.4.2.

That's always the case, and the meaning of "trunk". But trunk first has to
reach stability, both for usage, as for release building to be released as
release.

> I would like to use some of those features in a production environment,
> but don't like to use Trunk for production code. So I would like to try
> and plan/estimate how long we need to delay the usage of those language
> features in our code.

Such things are not a black/white thing, but a continuous scale. Just
applying a label "stable" to a formally "unstable" branch doesn't magically
make it stable.  Major releases do have a tendency to have some problems in
new major features.  (like Lazarus never using 2.4.0's new resource support
till 2.4.2)

So if you really have a big interest in these features, start using and
testing with trunk as soon as possible, since if you find major bugs, fixes
might still go into 2.6.0.  But for that they have to be discovered, and
fixed.