[fpc-devel] On code cleanup

[Jonas Maebe]

On 03 May 2009, at 12:44, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> 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.

Waiting with releasing 2.4 and spending time on 2.2.x fixes releases  
(instead of on a 2.4 release) is not going to speed up the  
implementation of full unicode support either.

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

I'm not aware of any big problems with 2.4 at this point (relative to  
2.2.4, or in general, except for what has been mentioned). As far as  
I'm concerned, it would be perfectly fine to split off a 2.4 branch  
today, and to release a first beta. I don't know what the situation is  
regarding the database components though (and maybe other things with  
which I have little to do).

> ere 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.

I think it is simply a bad idea to promise things before the work has  
been done. None of us can predict on what they will work or how much  
time they will have. As far as I am concerned, we should simply  
release when the result is stable (as in: no regressions since the  
previous release, so the new FPC release will be better than the  
previous one -- bar any missed bugs of course) and a certain amount of  
changes have been made (how many/which depends on the nature of the  
changes, the situation, external factors, etc).


Jonas