[fpc-devel] Breaking change in FPC 2.6.1

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Jonas Maebe schrieb:
> 
> Graeme Geldenhuys wrote on Wed, 25 Apr 2012:
> 
>> On 25 April 2012 11:08, Ludo Brands <ludo.brands at free.fr> wrote:
>>>
>>> I understand. Just wanted to clarify that, to my knowledge, all 3rd 
>>> party
>>> dataset descendants and some other programs using bookmarks are 
>>> affected by
>>> a change that wanted to minimize compatibility problems.
>>
>> Indeed, and it now has the total opposite effect.
>>
>> Shouldn't such code breaking changes be left to Trunk (2.7.1) and new
>> major FPC releases only. As far as I know, 2.6.x is now a "fixes"
>> branch which should only allow _bug fix_ commits - nothing more!
> 
> That's not entirely correct. It's of course mainly for fixes, but small 
> new features or important bug fixes that may break backwards 
> compatibility can also be merged under certain circumstances. What is 
> acceptable and what is not is obviously in the eye of the beholder, and 
> it's not uncommon to also have internal discussions about that among the 
> core developers.

 From the user VP the newer Delphi versions introduce a couple of 
breaking changes, so that it's highly desireable to have different 
Delphi *and* FPC versions available for maintaining legacy projects.

In Delphi this ends up in the use of different versions for different 
projects - but what about FPC (and Lazarus)? What's the last maintained 
FPC version, compatible with pre-Unicode Delphi? Do we have a 
compatibility list, between Delphi and FPC/Lazarus versions?

IMO changes introduced in Unicode Delphi (>2009) should be introduced 
only into equivalent Unicode FPC, not into older versions.

DoDi