[UPDATE] Patch of the Week #1 - now with actual code ;)

[kevh]

I think this is good idea but what may help Lazarus the most is maybe a very small group of our most active and trusted

members (or maybe no members but a counsel to manage things)  get together and create a non profit

organization/foundation,  maybe call it "Lazarus Foundation".  If all/most/some of the users of Lazarus would make a

commitment to donate/give 10 or 20 dollars a month to the foundation and let the foundation issue out the donated money to

Lazarus develops (based on priorities of what needs the most attention) to fix bugs, create new or update libraries/packages,

to work on documentation, creating tutorials for new Lazarus programmers or even new programmers in general.  From this

we would see our community grow.  What do you guys think?  If this happened I'd be the first to donate for sure.

[Lacak2]

Hi, may be, that this is bit OT, but exists there is bug tracker any "voting functionality" ?
So users can vote for features, they want to be implemented ...
(Some project has this and IMO it can be useful to track users interests)

[janasoft]

I completely agree with the suggestion of kevh about the fact of stablish a little donation to improve this excellent project. I'm not sure, anyway, that 10/20 dollars per month could be the best. I think is too much, but it will be possible to make a poll to the members of the forum to establish the best/possible rate

[BigChimp]

Re donations: see http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/How_to_donate_to_Lazarus

An alternative that I think could be much more feasible in the short term could be to write out bounties:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Bounties

[JuhaManninen]

If this happened I'd be the first to donate for sure.

Great!

You can click the "Donate" buttons (euro and dollar) on the left side of this page, or you can follow the link given by BigChimp.
Thanks.

A foundation is a legal entity that helps when managing bigger amounts of money. Now we don't have so much of it, and a PayPal account is enough. PayPal account has a limitation of 1500 euros of money traffic / year (IIRC) which has not exceeded yet. A Lazarus foundation may also happen in future, let's see.

So far the money has been used for buying MacMini for some developers, buying embedded gadgets to test, and for bounties for developers outside Lazarus team.

[BigChimp]

Ok, going with the motto "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing yourself"

Attached a .rc writer with test program that reads an executable and extracts the resources (icons, cursors, bitmaps...) into a debug subdirectory as well as writes an .rc script.

In other words, a resource decompiler.

Note it's not finished yet, but I'm looking forward to test results/suggestions/criticism.

This resource writer module can be used to extend fpcres so it gains .rc output functionality, but I'm currently going to use it to test the upcoming .rc=>fpcres resource reader unit.

One thing I'm struggling with is constants. A lot of them, e.g. VOS_NT_WINDOWS32 are defined in fpcres etc but of course one way: if I want to write out constant names to the .rc file when I get numeric values from fpcres I'll probably need some translation table.
I suppose there's no other way to do this?

[BigChimp]

Update: I'll keep my development version of the files in a repository:
https://bitbucket.org/reiniero/fpc_laz_patch_playground/src
directory resource

Saves having to upload updated files all the time