not sure if anyone else has thought of this: that Debian is playing a different game than the rest of us?
from the perspective of Debian, they are only interested in Lazarus and FPC for Linux, and in particular their particular flavour of Linux. to this end Debian (in theory) have no interest in maintaining the ability of FPC and Lazarus to run on or generate executables for Windows, MacOS, or anything else other than an operating system as shipped by DEBIAN. indeed, if it is easier for Debian to remove what they consider superfluous code and features that relate to Windows et al, then they will.
so we do need to be cautious - an FPC and Lazarus shipped by Debian only needs to cater for around 5% (or less) of the desktops out there - ie, those running Linux.
an argument could be put that if forking Lazarus (and/or FPC), the Debian folks should be renaming the two projects: perhaps as "Debian Pascal IDE" and "Debian Pascal Compiler", in order to distinguish their versions of the project(s) that target 5% of desktops (ie, only those running Linux), from the Lazarus/FPC that targets 90%+ of desktops (running Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc).
cheers,
rob :-)
addendum: red text added to remove any confusion being experienced by Thaddy.
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