Be or not to be compatible with Delphi and VCL? That's the ultimate question.
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There are 2 different things : _change_ the interface and _extend_ the interface.
Extending it does not break compatibility with existing Delphi apps. And yes, then LCL can be better than VLC.
But what about FireMonkey compatibility? Will be lazarus converter able to translate such code to LCL? Should be LCL enhanced to new abilities of FMX?
No. At least I have no plans to do that. If someone has big enough "itch" for it, then he will implement such converter.
But, I doubt it will happen any time soon, knowing the limited amount of contributors and their available time.
Back to topic: TCoolBar seems to me is better component than TControlBar. Both may not exists in other widgedsets but for windows apps it would be definitely good to have it.
Did you test TCoolBar with Delphi. In my tests it behaved wrong sometimes, hiding the bands and moving to wrong place. At design-time I could move the attached control away from the band. It was a mess. TControlBar behaved better for me.
There will not be a specific widgedset binding for these components. So, there will not be TWSCoolBar or TWSControlBar. They will be built from basic LCL components, like TPanel, which obviously have a widgedset binding.
Question is what features it should have? Completely same as VCL variant?
Hard part is drag and drop feature. Who tried to implement custom docking system knows how complicated it could be. And TCoolBar is basically "super toolbar" with draggable horizontal or vertical autoarranged subtoolbars or better to say bands as container for other TWinControl descendants.
The interface defined by Borland must be identical, more or less. "Interface" here means everything in protected, public and published sections.
Yes, let's see how drag and drop goes. It will be another exercise.
I would like to contribute with own code but both Lazarus and FPC is not well organized project. It has bugtracker, forum, wiki but all is rather unperfect and everything is moving very slowly. I have three bug reports opened for few months some even with submitted patch but nobody cares. There are no human resources. There are other priorities. Core programmers work only in spare time. Am I idealist or something is wrong? Some significant example how things could work? Look at LibreOffice or some linux distributions.
I saw you have 2 open issues, both with patches. I try to look at them soon (Paul Ishenin seems to be busy).
I am sorry on behalf of Lazarus developers. Bug reports with patches should not be ignored. It is bad.
Otherwise I don't see such big problems in the development process or tools. I also don't believe that other projects can do it significantly better. All big projects have thousands of open tickets. It is not unusual.
Maybe I am willing to update czech localization but need access to repository just to language files. I dont want to bother anyone with every file update to be merged. Look at Launchpad and other projects how it can work easily.
Many things could be better. TCoolBar is just only one pease which wont save whole project. It is for another long offtopic discussion
Maxim seems to apply translations happily. Why is it a problem?
But yes, let's not make it off-topic. Please open a new topic, especially if you have specific ideas how to improve things.
Juha