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Willibald Krenn
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Kylix Community Project - thoughts2004-09-15 09:18:10 AM kylix2 Hi! Just a few thoughts on the FreeCLX project. Probably nobody here will know that I've taken Andreas' patches and made a (more or less) Delphi 6 Interface compatible version. It's not perfectly 100% compatible, but I've recompiled the runtime packages and my D6 IDE now runs with the patched CLX under the hood. I've done this, because I need the cross platform feature of Borland's CLX framework (including full package support). Now, given that Andreas already speaks of doing a complete interface change or/and update the CLX to make use of QT x.y, I fear that I won't be able to use any of the work the Kylix Community Project will do. (Neither will I be able to contribute.) Generally my concerns can be summed up as follows: ->I really doubt that the community respects the cross-platform approach (D6, D7, K1, K2, K3, ... ) ->The community doesn't have the financial backing to buy a Kylix/Delphi QT x.y devel license - with the result, that every program based on the 'FreeCLX' with updated QT binding would have to be GPLed. (Which is an absolute No-No) ->Lack of QA (For my tasting even now some of Andreas' patches are too far away from original source and a likely source of errors) ->The CLX community is rather small and I fear I've not seen any contribution done by the other project admins ->Borland has now officially 'killed' CLX as officially supported platform. ->Who stears the whole project? Who is responsible for getting releases out the door? (And how often?) Do 'we' have a homepage? (Or is this some unimportant sub-project to Indy?) ->What's the process of contributing a change to the codebase and how will the QA handle it? (Test-tools for QA? Bug database?) IOW: Who decides what goes in, how will the change be tested and how to apply for a change? ->Will Borland include the project outcome in e.g. D9? ->In which way will Borland support the whole idea? (QT License?) Plus: It doesn't solve the issue of 'buggy Kylix IDE' and we won't get any compiler updates. So - in fact - this is bad news. In my humble opinion - if Borland is asking for help of the community - 'we' should take Lazarus, implement an option to call the Borland compiler, add the missing controls to the LCL and write an import wizard for Kylix/Delphi projects. Perhaps it would even be possible to rework the LCL in parts so that it would be possible to use it with Borland's Delphi Win32 compiler/IDE product line. This way the community would win most: A free Pascal compiler (with source) plus IDE on the Linux side and still the option to load/compile applications with normal Borland Delphi/Kylix compilers. Plus: The community would be totally independant from Borland. Of course the freepascal guys also have a Windows32 version of Lazarus.. Willi |