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<p>There is now a release candidate for Lazarus 3.0 available, of
particular packaging interest might be the fact that it now does
Qt6 ? Given the current packaging policy of breaking Lazarus up
into 'modules' its going to mean an additional module.</p>
<p>Is this a good time to consider that packaging policy ? There
seems a number of reasons why we might be better having one single
Lazarus package instead of several.</p>
<p>1. Its the Lazarus Developer's Intention, its how the SourceForge
packages are put together. Its how the internal documentation
reads.<br>
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<p>2. Its far less confusing for a new user. As someone who is often
involved in helping new comers via the Lazarus Forum and writes
some content for the Lazarus Wiki, new users often do not
understand why most instructions assume everything is installed. <br>
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<p>3. It would make packaging the Debian official packages far
easier. Abou does a fantastic job but I am quite sure he does more
work, and has to solve more complicated problems because of the
dividing he needs to do with the current model.</p>
<p>4. A minimal install of Lazarus, based on GTK2 is probably the
wrong message to send now anyway. GTK2 is depreciated. <br>
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<p>The only real reason not to have only an all in one package I can
see is diskspace. However, apart from the two Qt modules, Lazarus
is of little use without everything so most users end up
installing everything anyway, its just they have to make what is
often a difficult decision and end up doing so bit by bit. When
Lazarus was new, we though a 20G drive was pretty cool. But now,
while Lazarus has grown, typical disk sizes have grown far more !</p>
<p>I would not suggest an all in one should pull in the Qt
dependencies, that really would be excessive but with the relevant
libraries (libqt6pas and libqt6pas) bringing it their own
dependencies as needed, the two Lazarus QT 'modules' are not that
big anyway !</p>
<p>Anyway, its a suggestion. Please consider. At least the time and
effort we get from Abou needs to be valued.</p>
<p>Davo</p>
<p>PS : Qt6 looks pretty good. I can build my app (tomboy-ng) with
it and, so far, tests fine. There is an issue about theming that
shows up in some dialogue boxes being slow to open. Using qt6ct
solves this problem, its a workaround but effective. A similar
issue exists with Qt5 on some desktops. <br>
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