4 November 2007

A friend involved in the Lazarus and Free Pascal Compiler projects told me that they maintain a private repository for their packages. And .deb files for newer versions for Lazarus and fpc are available on SF.net. It’s funny to read the Lazarus Ubuntu repository while Ubuntu is using the Debian packages through the Universe section. And as far as I noticed these are the same packages. Anyway, I don’t think ignoring Debian gives us motivation regarding these packages (at least to myself as I’m not involved with these packages). It seems there’s a good will by Carlos Laviola, the fpc package maintainer and Mazen Neifer from freepascal.org to build the new version for Debian. I think that working tighter may result in better packages for the project. Looking at the Mazen’s changelog reveals that the new version closes 3 bug reports in Debian. But without releasing the source package (or at least the diff.gz file), we can’t really see all the changes done by you. From the changelog, I can also see the private packages don’t use changes done in Debian. Meaning they probably have some bugs already fixed in Debian. I see both people are members of the http://bollin.googlecode.com/svn/fpc/trunk/ repository, so what is the problem? It seems to me that a win-win situation is in our grasp with a little effort which will result in better packages for the fpc community.