May I make a suggestion on how FPC releases could be done in the future to allow for releasing say a patched unit in the FCL, but keep the compiler/RTL coupled?
I think it would be very beneficial for both the FPC project and the developer community if the compiler/RTL were decoupled from the FCL. This will allow fast and quick patching and/or improvements to the various FCL units, while the compiler/RTL can be released when they are known to be stable enough and production worthy. This would essentially mimic the current FPC+Lazarus combos we see today, except with this, it will be FPC+FCL+Lazarus. I understand how it might add some confusion, however when a developer downloads the FPC, they will have the option to also download the current FCL, or if they just want the RTL only for whatever reason, say embedded programming where most FCL units are not fully compatible, they can. The current distribution of an all-in-one FPC install bundle should also be provided of course, as it currently is.
I'm just saying, it would be really nice to just patch the FCL once in awhile when a unit such as csvdataset is patched, but keep our current compiler/RTL. As with Lazarus, the various FCL versions will need to denote which versions of the compiler/RTL it has been tested under, but for the most part, users won't be mixing and matching, they will just download the latest compiler/RTL/FCL install bundle as usual, and not even know that the contained FCL is even newer than the compiler/RTL.
I figure that generally FCL patches are easier to test, and usually will contain very critical patches such as for security vulnerabilities, memory leaks, and other bugs which may break applications if it is not patched soon.