[fpc-pascal] Commercial support for Lazarus/FPC

[Sven Barth]

On 21.04.2012 12:12, denisgolovan wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I am considering to subscribe to commercial support in FPC/Lazarus, but I don't have a clear picture what actually support is :)
> I am looking at http://www.lazarussupport.com/lazarus/Support and it is somewhat too abstract.
>
> I thought maybe it is easier to see what I am interested in and to give a concrete example.
> So if you don't mind, I'll try to describe a couple of alternatives.
>
> Personally, I am interested in maintenance in FPC/Lazarus existing functionality.
> But for objective reasons sometimes I am stuck with some bug in FPC/Lazarus.
>
> So I have several choices there.
>
> First one and the easiest - to report it and try to wait until the next stable version release.
> And yes, unfortunately it is too much time between releases currently.
> Furthermore if the reported bug is fixed, it is fixed only in trunk and no backporting occurs.
> Again no hard feelings, I fully understand that it is a open-source project and you do the best you can.
>
> Second one - try to follow FPC/Lazarus development in trunk every time something is fixed.
> That's the way I am currently following. Unfortunately, the trunks (FPC and Lazarus) can be unstable and when something is fixed, the other existing functionality stops working.
> Again - that's the fact of life and I can't demand anything here.
>
> Third alternative, which I wanted to discuss in more details, is bug-fix backporting to the last stable version.
> Yes, it is time-consuming and it is quite costly, but it guarantees the quality.
> Again, I could do it myself, keeping the patches I am interested in in a separate private repository, but :
>   1. I think a lot of people can be potentially interested in such
>   repository, so the costs can be divided between the "stakeholders" and
>   qualitative commercial support can be provided.
>   2. Some patches are too complex for me to maintain by myself.
>
> Please give your suggestion for dealing with my/similar problems.
>
> Again maybe Professional type of support can include backports service?

You do know that bug fixes are often backported if possible/feasible? 
E.g. currently we have the release 2.6.0, trunk is at 2.7.1 and there is 
the fixes branch 2.6.1 which is based on 2.6.0, but contains fixes (and 
often features) that were merged from trunk and will be in 2.6.2 then. 
The fixes branches are usually more stable than trunk (though trunk of 
at least FPC is usually rather stable as well).

Regards,
Sven