Sternas doesn't look like a guy with highly developed sense of humor, but your proposal using svn branches is a great trojan horse joke. According to your proposal, hnb needs two simultaneous branches(one for FPC and one for Lazaus). Who would use those!? He doesn't need them, he can develop without svn/git because he's the only FreeSparta developer. It's the most secure&diplomatic way to manipulate him. Let's face it: MOST OF THAT CODE WILL NEVE GET INTO SVN TRUNK! If you would have had the value of a drahma, and Sternas wouldn't appreciate yes-men, for sure he would have replied to this forum topic long time ago, expressing his point of view regarding some of the vocal Lazarus core developers.
This is total nonsense. You even don't know what you're talking about. So let me explain just few reasons for separate branch, which is my idea and it does not need to be acceppted by other core developers (separate branch in this case is just because of huge amount of changes which needs to be done in lazarus, otherwise it can be simple patch review) :
1.In the past we had a lot of "trojan" patches with copy pasted Delphi code (I know that hnb isn't guy who will do that, but anyway - we must be sure that future of our Lazarus project does not rely on stealed code.).
2.We are doing development on Lazarus project when we have enough spare time. So it's easier to review/test such changes in separate branch and then merge it, than first commit/merge and then reviewing one huge patch. Trunk is pretty stable for years, such changes can make it pretty unstable for months, even years.
3.What if such huge amount of changes contains "rm -rf /*" ? If such stuff is comitted you'll laugh I guess .
4.Code formatting is according to our standards ? Yes, it's pretty important, code must be readable.
5.What's the point with new patch ? Does it fix any bug ? Does it introduce new feature ? Or it's just code bloat ?
6.You must be developer of non "Hello world" apps to understand 1.)...5.)
So, IMO, branch for this situation is most clever solution.
More eyes will look into, so less chance to have problem, more developers can give
advice,support etc etc. If someone have better idea than "blindly" commit changes into trunk, then please express your opinion.
It's not trojan horse, but better than "split that into small patches and explain each of them". This is not "Hello world" project, so we must have some kind of control otherwise it'll easy run into bloat.
Don't want to talk about fpc developers, but this is how things are going on inside Lazarus project. And yes: hnb is pretty good developer and I would like to see him as part of Lazarus team.