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

[Jonas Maebe]

On 03 Oct 2011, at 16:06, Alexander Klenin wrote:

> 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 think http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_Trunk looks quite  
good.

Apart from that, I agree with the sentiment that it does not make  
sense trying to stuff everything and the kitchen sink under the FPC  
umbrella. Everything that's distributed that way automatically becomes  
the responsibility of the "core" developers of the day, and that  
collection of source code has grown much faster than the number of  
people maintaining it (and in a number of cases, maintainers have also  
disappeared). So distributing packages separately generally indeed  
makes much more sense for everyone (more flexibility for the  
maintainer, less responsibility and stagnation risk for the FPC  
project due to additional responsibilities).

And in this particular case, there does remain the fact that the  
cpstrnew adaptations are far from finished and that part of the  
functionality in this "utf-8 package" may well become part of the RTL  
or FCL. If there is then also a separate utf-8 package used by  
fpvectorial, and possibly also by user programs, you can bet that  
people would (understandably) complain if functionality is then  
removed from this utf-8 package to prevent code and maintenance  
duplication.

That's also why Florian mentioned the branch: does not cause wrong  
expectations (users won't start using that package), the code is  
available in svn and therefore it can be used for finishing the  
cpstrnew work where appropriate, and before/when merging to trunk we  
can first look at what should be removed or changed to prevent  
duplication of functionality. But again: as a non-FPC package you  
indeed avoid this overhead and the uncertainty that when the time  
merging arrives, you won't be able to merge everything you want.


Jonas