When finally a decision will be made regarding which GUI to be made/used, then there will be rock solid stability.
What you mean by "GUI"?
To me that would mean Win-API vs Gtk,Qt,Cocoa? But that should affect only very few of the components?
But never mind, there will always be some amount of maintenance required. Happens with any open source package manager (or rather anything where packages/add-ons are contributed). Node's npm, Perl's cpan, whatever the other languages call it. ... Firefox add-ons (probably Chrome too?).
Of course if you look at something like npm, with myriads of contributors, there is either a patch readily available (but you have to apply it), or a fork or an alternative package....
Have you ever tried building gdb on Windows? You need either Cygwin or msys and mingw. And then you can start searching for all the right packages, and the right versions, and maybe patches to gdb sources. And usually the error comes a half an hour into the build. => Install a package in Lazarus, you will know in 2 or 3 minutes if it builds.
And packages for components will need updates, every time any OS/Framework changes its API. Nothing that can be done about it. As soon as any distribution changes the way they build/provide gtk, amendments may be needed.
In the end however the problem of having lots of pre-tested packages available would not be solved by shipping them in a big installer.
The reason that are 3rd party packages is, that the Lazarus team does not have enough people/time to develop/maintain all of them.
If we were putting them into a big installer, they would come with the same problems.
In conclusion, what we need is a volunteer (or several), who agree to do the maintenance work.That is they would have too:
- regularly test all 3rd party packages against the Lazarus svn trunk => inform developers about needed changes, help them to fix it.
- 2 weeks before a release, update the OPM database. Update the compatibly list. Edit which package version to use with which Lazarus.
- Scour the web for new packages to be include. Contact the authors
- Help any author in adding their packages.
- Any other maintenance.
- Do that for all target os/wigetset: Mac,Linux,WinXP-Win10 / 32/64bit / QT or Win/Gtk/Cocoa / latest fpc, and previous fpc // in all combinations
This person we do not have.
So if anyone wants to volunteer....This person would also be required, if (subjunctive) we were to ship it all as an installer.
Because before building such an all-in-one installer you need a working set of components. And then you need someone to run the build script....