[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2012, Martin Schreiber wrote:

>> I cannot tell you neither any other
>> developer what they have to develop. We could close down all write
>> accesses to fpc svn till the features you need are developed but I fear
>> you won't get them either this way. People would just fork fpc or fpc
>> would die. So what do you propose?
>>
> I propose to extend and render more precisely the mission goals of FPC and to
> concentrate the power on the defined goals.

That would mean telling people what to do: not to do what they want, 
but what is needed for the goals of FPC.

That said, the mission goals are quite known:
- Free, cross-platform Object Pascal compiler.
- As Delphi compatible as possible.

All within the restrictions of available manpower.

>>> Or is FPC simply a playground for the FPC-developers?
>>> Then that should be
>>> communicated too and I probably was wrong to invest so much time into the
>>> development of MSEide+MSEgui.
>>
>> If nobody is interested in features you need, bad luck for you, you have
>> three possibilities: develop them yourself, pay somebody to develop them
>> or use another compiler.
>
> Thanks for the message.
> I must say, in MSEide+MSEgui project the things are handled a little bit
> different. For example I never planned to internationalize MSEide because it
> complicates things, is a boring task and I did not see a benefit. Now a
> Russian speaking user convinced me, that MSEide can be used in Russian
> schools only, if translated to Russian. I liked the idea to use our loved
> Free Pascal in schools, so I took the boring task and moved the string
> constants to tstringcontainer so it can be translated.

You say it yourself: 'I liked the idea'.

This is not so different from what we do:
The bugtracker is filled with evidence of this.

Once more, the main restriction is lack of time. Not lack of direction.
If it was easy it would have been done already.

Michael.