Comment by 🚀 lars_the_bear
Re: "Debian removes Free Pscal/Lazarus [https link]"
@stack : to be honest, I don't even know whether there's a substantive technical problem here at all, or just a display of intransigence. As you say (I think) the kind of person who'd be able to use FPC/Lazarus would probably be able to build it from source.
Mar 01 · 2 months ago
3 Later Comments ↓
🐙 norayr [mod] · Mar 01 at 16:17:
stack, thatk you for posting,
i have read everything, and in short:
a) regarding fpc itself there was misunderstanding.
debian folks mistakenly decided it has dependency on gtk2 just because fpc sources contain gtk2 bindings.
those bindings compile without even gtk2 being present. it is to actually link to gtk2 you need gtk2.
fpc source also contains gtk1 and dbus and cairo bindings and many more, so that was pointed out to debian people and fpc problem was solved
b) lazarus problem was that by default and in debian it builds programs that use gtk2. well lcl library has different backends. it has gtk3 backend almost finished, it has full qt5 backend, qt6 is almost finished.
🐙 norayr [mod] · Mar 01 at 16:21:
so maintainers decided to build debian lazarus in a way it'll use qt5 backend by default.
some pascal devs didnt like it because if they could before just send one binary to their clients now they also need to include a pascal wrapper to qt .so library.
it is not necessary for gtk because gtk is c and qt is c++.
so a binary and a .so should be sent to those clients.
plus u cant link to qt staticalry because of license.
to that dev it was suggested to use appimage.
🐙 norayr [mod] · Mar 01 at 16:24:
then there was discussion about native pascal widget toolkits.like msegui and fpgui and custom drawn.
those have almost no deps, like just x11 and they can draw. but not everything is supported, lets say recently i wanted a treeview and there was no in fpgui.
also someone mentioned that ardour devs decided to fork gtk2 as ytk because for them porting all their custom controls built on top of gtk2 is not feasible.
i know that maemo os also maintains their gtk2 port but they want, if resources will allow to port everything to gtk3.
Original Post
Debian removes Free Pscal/Lazarus [https link]