[fpc-devel] On code cleanup

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Jonas Maebe said:
> > (I don't think the situation with 2.2.6 changed from the one with  
> > 2.2.4. I
> > don't see a 2.4 release within the year happening.
> 
> I don't see what the problem is with stabilising/releasing 2.4 as it  
> is. If generics and Delphi 2009-style ansistrings are not going to get  
> finished any time soon, why not release 2.4 without them being  
> finalised?

Well, Lazarus is currently amassing large handcoded UTF8 ansistring
codebases, something I don't think that is healthy. If unicode is postponed
to the next major release, it will be long, very long before this is cleaned
up.

How far do you think we are from releasing 2.4 then? Maybe plan an alpha
release to see where we stand?

> There are plenty of other improvements and changes. And the  
> longer we wait with releasing it,
> a) the more time spent on merging (and discussing merges)
> b) the bigger the changes will be for the end users and the harder it  
> will be to adapt programs
> c) the harder it is for end users to test programs against it and to  
> find all errors before the release
> d) the harder it is for us to stabilise it before the release (because  
> more changes -> more potential bugs)

There is some sense in that yes. Still, I keep getting the feeling then that
we don't deliver on the 2.4 promises then, and worse that the early 2.4
delays the impotant features more than that it helps bring them to users
faster.