[fpc-devel] [RFC] Modernising the FPC Release Process -- Proposal for Review

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Thu, 16 Apr 2026, Marco van de Voort via fpc-devel wrote:

>
> Op 16-4-2026 om 00:30 schreef Tomas Hajny via fpc-devel:
>> 
>> As somebody having been involved in that role in the past (see 
>> https://wiki.freepascal.org/Release_Template and e.g. 
>> https://wiki.freepascal.org/Release_2.0.4), I can say for sure that the 
>> release coordinator / release master / ... certainly doesn't need to know 
>> all the details of the compiler, RTL and everything else at the same time 
>> :-) - this isn't the issue. From my experience, making sure that people who 
>> can tackle specific tasks blocking the release (should it be particular 
>> manual steps in the release building process, or fixing some issue which 
>> popped out during the build), find needed time for addressing the needed 
>> things, is the biggest obstacle. 
>
> Amen.

2 things:

It's 2026. The world has changed.

Back in 2022 that was correct reasoning. Today I will ask Claude to fix it.
This will seriously reduce the need to wait.

Secondly:

For a release train I simply do not intend to wait for the non-major platforms:

The release train only waits for mac/windows/linux. If another platform is
included: so much the better. If not, nothing is lost:

Having a branch/tag "release/3.2.4-os2" is not an issue, that some small fixes 
may be needed to build for the other platforms builds to function is acceptable, 
and can be done from the released branch. We only punish ourselves by
requiring the exact same tag for all platforms. Remove that need and we can
continue much faster.

The risk of this will be smaller if we have a good testing & builder infrastructure
set up: if a non-major platform can be included in that, then the problem simply
does not arise.

Here at work we exclusively use linux to build Delphi applications for 6 platforms. 
This is in no way different from what FPC needs to do.

Michael.