[Pkg-pascal-devel] Lazarus 3.0 as a single package ?

[David Bannon]

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.

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.

1. Its the Lazarus Developer's Intention, its how the SourceForge 
packages are put together. Its how the internal documentation reads.

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.

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.

4. A minimal install of Lazarus, based on GTK2 is probably the wrong 
message to send now anyway. GTK2 is depreciated.


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 !

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 !

Anyway, its a suggestion. Please consider. At least the time and effort 
we get from Abou needs to be valued.

Davo

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.

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