[fpc-pascal]Re: Schedule request (educational and olympiad applications of FPC)

[Marco van de Voort]

(sorry for the delay, we were having roadmap discussions in FPC core)

> I soon have to commit my choice of FreePascal version to have 
installed  on the laptops of our new first-year students coming this 
fall.
> Furthermore, the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) this 
year
> is taking place in September, and software versions are in the 
process
> of being decided.
> 
> For the IOI, it is not so important to have Delphi compatibility,
> but for my education it is.

Delphi compat is at all time high in 1.9.x. So I definitely would 
suggest taking the newest 1.9.x snapshot, and postpone it as long as
possible. Usually, the faculty dependant part of the images is made 
quite late in the summer holidays, so maybe even 1.9.6 can be
doable.

However maybe it would be better to ship 1.9.4 that has been out a 
while than a 1.9.6 that is brand new.

> For the IOI, it looks like we'll stick to 1.0.10 (unless a stable
> release will appear "soon").

1.9.x is undoubtedly more stable than 1.0.10. The stability criteria
for 2.0 are simply higher, which is why 1.9.x are still branded beta's.
 
1.0.10 is now already off lifesupport, and quite a lot of the users are 
already using 1.9.x beta releases. In august this percentage will be 
even higher.

What to do with IOI depends on how usable 1.0.10 is for that kind
of purposes. (if it was ok the other years, then stick to it). However 
at some point there must be a transition to 1.9.x/2.0 too for IOI, so 
even if you choose 1.0.10 because it is a known factor, get some 1.9.x 
testing process running for IOI too.

> For my teaching, I would prefer a 1.9. (or 2.0 ??) version.
> What are the current development/release plans?  Which 1.9 version
> is sufficiently stable?

1.9.4 very soon now (as in the coming days), and other 1.9.x versions 
every 2 months  (but that usually slips a few weeks/months).

2.0 is not expected before september, but throughout the beta cycle,
the stability improves quickly, so the last beta's just before 2.0 are 
expected to be more about release engineering, IDE and improving the 
new support on the new architectures than about the normal release 
stuff.

P.s. some roadmap schedules are at 
http://www.freepascal.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Road_to_2.0

Marco van de Voort (MarcoV at Stack.nl or marco at freepascal.org)