New Get Lazarus Initiative

[sysrpl]

@SilverWarior;

Thank you for your considerate reply. We've been discussing things both on the official pascal+lazarus mailing lists, as well as on forum.lazarus.freepascal.org

What I suggested and and others agreed to was to, like any other wiki, provide extern hyper links, the ones with orange arrows next to them. These extern hyper links are keyed on the word "Lararus" linking it to www.lazarus.freepascal.org on any page the first time the word appears (unless it's bolded as a topic first). This same rule applies to "Free Pascal". With the help of some editors, we've already got this done.

With regards to the changes we've made to Lazarus, they are mostly covered in the What's New page. There are some technical details where I personally believe super user rights should not be required to install software if it can be avoided, and to this end I've made the installers always keep everything confined to one folder off your $HOME folder. Anything that needs to change is in that folder and it doesn't interfere with any other folder on your computer, save for optionally installing an easily accessible shortcut (totally optional). If you want to get rid of our bundle, just delete that one folder and it's gone. On Windows I do install create start menu items, just for convenience so users can go to Start and type "Laz" and see the words "Lazarus 1.4 Test". In that case running the uninstaller deleted the start menu folder as well.

Another point, all out changes are in changes.diff which is the preferred method to share modifications wit the Lazarus and the Free Pascal teams. The changes.diff comes with every install and is located in the root of the lazarus folder. On Linux we actually just ship the source and build everything for you, applying:

patch -p0 -i $BASE/lazarus/changes.diff

in our install script, which is hosted here github and clearly denoted on our site:

http://github.com/sysrpl/Codebot.Set...c-3.0.linux.sh

Now whether we are going to repeat everything stated above somewhere on getlazarus.org is being considered. I personally weigh in on No, as I prefer to keep things simple and unencumbered with unnecessary information for the majority of our visitors, though we haven't fully decided yet.

And finally, with regards to codetyphon, yes we are aware of them. Your concern is understandable and well founded. I don't know how to communicate any degree of trust on this issue other than to say, look at my previous work, look at the fact that I don't sell anything on any of my site, be they ads or software. All I can say is I understand your concern.