[fpc-devel] Russian locale information not compatible with FPC locale variables

[Michael Van Canneyt]

> On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Daniël Mantione
> <daniel.mantione at freepascal.org> wrote:
> >> Boost the usage of Unicode in FPC that would boost the usage of FPC
> >> itself. Unicode is one of the most demanded features (beside cross platform,
> >> 64bit support, etc) in Delphi since Delphi 7 (2001?). Yet, CodeGear never
> >> fulfill it until Tiburon.
> >
> > Why would it boost FPC usage?
> 
> Like Bee said... The time frame has come and gone!  If you read the
> delphi.non-technical newsgroup you would notice that quite a few
> Delphi developers use FPC for backend features. Linux services etc...
> They also talked about FPC having 64bit support.  If FPC didn't worry
> to much about compatibility and instead implemented Unicode support
> long ago like it could have, it might just have boosted FPC usage,
> beating Borland to the punch by about 7 years.  FPC could have
> attracted and converted more Delphi developers...
> 
> Yes it's always easy to say that with the benefit of hindsight, but
> it's not far from the truth.  Our company is a case in point. We saw
> features in FPC that we would like and Borland was going in the wrong
> direction for us.  At that point in time (2-3 years ago) there was no
> mention of when Delphi would ever support those features. FPC seemed
> the obvious choice to us, so we moved - an still with no regrets. :-)
> Yes it costed use some time and effort to port our code and required
> tools, but it's still been worth it. We can now target different
> platforms, 32/64bit systems.... Our next evolution for our products
> are non-English speaking countries, hence the Unicode requirements.
> 
> But the time frame to beat Delphi with Unicode support has passed...  :-(

Well, if we could clone the FPC team a couple of times, we probably
would have had it a long time ago. And a host of other things at well.

But we are few, we have day jobs, and we're not being paid for any of this.

Volunteers have also been very scarce. Talks of foundations and whatnot
have popped up at various times, but always dwindled away, no-one doing
anything was the result time and again.

And that is the whole explanation for some features not being there: 
it's open source, and a hobby project for the core teams.

If users badly need some features, it's time they organized themselves and
get something going to support FPC development *actively*.

If this doesn't happen, then I conclude that these features aren't really
needed, but are in the domain of 'nice to have'.

Michael.