[fpc-pascal]About order of units...

[L D Blake]

In reply to your message of August 31, 2003
>>Yep... I know.  But it occurs to me that whoever did the conversion didn't
>>check very carefully.

> When the windows unit was created it was more important to get the compiler 
> running correct natively under windows. After that nobody took care of 
> walking the whole windows unit because it is a boring job to do. The 
> windows unit worked for us and the users didn't report problems so it 
> stayed that way. The current developpers have other priorities that they 
> want to do than updating the windows unit. FPC is open source so you are 
> welcome to supply patches to fix the windows unit.

I am still learning here, Peter... I know TP 5 from years ago, I know windows
from last month and I haven't even ventured in to OOP yet... I really don't
think myself qualified to take on a big job like this, at least not right now.

That said... I will be happy to work with, perhaps coordinate, a group of more
advanced FP users who DO want to take on the task of improving the unit. I have
the time (and hopefully the patience) to go through the source and find all
the obvious errors, perhaps even do some minor bug fixing. If a couple of
others would like to help with compiling (I can't get this unit to compile to
save my soul!) and testing maybe we can get the job done.

But then... that's a 5 year old unit that never had any real testing or
developement, it might actually be worthwhile to reconstruct the unit from
scratch. The new Platform SDK from Microsoft has all the .h files for nt4,
2000, xp, and 2003 in it, including support for transparency, overlays, xp
styles, and a bunch of nifty new controls that are in the current versions but
are not supported by FP. It might actually make more sense to start over
rather than simply patching up an antique.

Anyone who'd be willing to take this on can contact me privately as
ldblake at sympatico.ca and we can at least discuss the idea.


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 L D Blake