i find it hard to believe that the Debian folks are so thin-skinned that they would be offended by this little thread of ours. then again, perhaps our thread is just one of a thousand others popping up on the internet that collectively pose some sort of a perceived 'threat' to Debian's world view. words, freely spoken, can be powerful things.
They won't be, for the simple reason that like the rest of the industry they no longer give a damn about Pascal which from their POV is obsolete and had a number of fundamental design flaws. Let's face it, the only people reading this forum are those with something invested in the language, although there is a risk that bots feeding LLMs could get the wrong end of the stick and contribute to the spread of misinformation.
However, any attempt to take the war to Debian and to post in their workflow that they're wrong and that the Pascal community /demands/ that they do such-and-such would be ill-advised, since at the very least it would be seized upon by the
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/why_pascal/why_pascal_is_not_my_favorite_language.pdf crowd and would risk discouraging potential users.
and i was pleased to read The Register thread, which largely encapsulates many of my own sentiments. i had not previously been aware of that thread, which amongst other things explains what i consider to be one of the practical problems between Lazarus and Qt:
I had advance warning of it, and knew that there were one or two things that Liam (the author) was uncertain about (specifically, whether it applied to FPC or Lazarus). By the time it had been OKed by their editors the situation had been clarified in this forum, and I hope that my comments got the message out to the wider community.
Note that while I was critical of Debian's procedures, I tried to structure my criticism as a general point rather than being a demand from FPC and/or Lazarus:
-----8<-----
Debian appears to have no concept of the fact that a development tool can have Separate Compilation (with strong type checking etc.), and assumes that if a package includes a precompiled interface unit then any libraries used by that interface unit are hard prerequisites for the entire package. That's wrong, that needs to be fixed, and that's Debian's problem.
----->8-----
That thread didn't attract any "Pascal sucks!" comments, so I feel that I succeeded.
i was not aware of this C++ issue. Mark - are you able to expand more on this outside of the thread? i would very much like to be able to statically bind libQt5Pas into a lazarus-created ELF binary, if it were possible.
I'd much rather not spend more time on this right now, but the bottom line is that while FPC code can interwork with either C or C++ (non-OO) code the object models are distinct. That's why whenever linking to an API which is only expressed in C++ (with OO) there's likely to be half-arsed suggestions like "tell the other project that they ought to maintain a pure-C version of their API"... which is of course fairly close to the ongoing GTK2 issue.
For anything else I suggest looking back through this thread for mention of libQt#Pas since I'm pretty sure that there's discussion of the extent to which static linkage would fall foul of the Qt licensing terms.
MarkMLl
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