[fpc-devel] utf-8 package in Free Pascal

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 4 Oct 2011, Alexander Klenin wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 00:42, Florian Klämpfl <florian at freepascal.org> wrote:
>>> Anyway, what I suggest is IMO a good compromise and should satisfy both
>>> sides --
>>> Felipe can continue development of his packages unobstucted,
>>> while the quality of FPC will not suffer.
>>
>> That's why I proposed a branch and that's what branches are for.
>
> No, the branches (in svn, at least) are for code that is an
> alternative/in-progress
> imlpementation of some features, not for features rejected from the main branch.
>
>> For example a TString* class for UTF-8 might even go into classes. But this
>> needs to be done carefully.
>
> There is, again, a continuum between careful development and stangation.
> While acknowledging great work that FPC team has done on the former,
> I'd venture to say that is came uncomfortably close to the latter.

I'd venture to disagree.

Attached is a small graph from the bugtracker activity.
As you can see, the bugfix rate remains constant, which refutes 'stagnation'.
We do work, even if it is not so 'visible'.

Many things are not even in this graph, as Jonas pointed out with his WIKI link.

The difficulty is:

The more code there is, the more it must be maintained. 
The team does not grow at the same rate as the lines of code in the files we distribute,
meaning that virtually the same amount of people must maintain more code.

Now, to counter the perception of stagnation, you can help:

I suspect faster release schedules could help to counter this perception. So:
Please help us working on fppkg, which should allow a much more free release 
schedule for FPC, and especially for the packages.

Using fppkg as a distribution mechanism would release the FPC team from the 
need to maintain everything in the FPC subversion. People could add packages 
to the repository, and release updates of their packages at will.

Slowly, we (mainly Joost, in fact) are converting the FPC packages to this new 
mechanism, fixing bugs as we go along. You can help by testing this, and converting 
more packages to the new fppkg.

Michael.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: activity.png
Type: image/png
Size: 2463 bytes
Desc: 
URL: <http://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-devel/attachments/20111003/2a8f4450/attachment.png>