Hello
We are slowly moving towards the next Lazarus 1.4 release. (No fixed date yet.)
The list of open issues targeted for 1.4 is partly cleaned. There were ~400 of them (for historical reasons), now they are down to ~140.
Maybe due to increased popularity the total number of open bug reports has grown rapidly, now 1700+ and counting. New reports are opened faster than developers can solve them.
The development team is apparenly under-powered. Some areas are not maintained as actively as they should.
I would now like to ask help with the bug reports, not only the ones targeted for 1.4 but any report.
I know there are talented coders here. For example graphics oriented people may find these easy to solve:
http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=7230and
http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=7290I believe there are bugs for everyone's taste. If some people here take their most annoying bug and fix it, it would directly benefit the next version. What is a realistic number of patches to expect? I don't know, surprise me...
There is another problem: finding patches from old bug reports is difficult due to Mantis UI. The list shows the number of attachments for each report, but most of them are not patches.
There may well be more ignored patches sitting there which is bad. If anybody knows about valid, ignored patches, please tell.
From now on, when you attach a patch, mark the issue with a tag "patch". The category "Patch" is not very usefull because patches can finally be attached to any report.
P.S.
The historical reason I mentioned is that years ago people targeted bugs and feature requests for 1.0 and "post 1.0", then for 1.2 and "post 1.2". Eventually all of them were postponed into 400 issues for 1.4.