Hi all

I am considering to subscribe to commercial support in FPC/Lazarus, but I don't have a clear picture what actually support is :) I am looking at http://www.lazarussupport.com/lazarus/Support and it is somewhat too abstract.

I thought maybe it is easier to see what I am interested in and to give a concrete example. So if you don't mind, I'll try to describe a couple of alternatives.

Personally, I am interested in maintenance in FPC/Lazarus existing functionality. But for objective reasons sometimes I am stuck with some bug in FPC/Lazarus.

So I have several choices there.

First one and the easiest - to report it and try to wait until the next stable version release. And yes, unfortunately it is too much time between releases currently. Furthermore if the reported bug is fixed, it is fixed only in trunk and no backporting occurs. Again no hard feelings, I fully understand that it is a open-source project and you do the best you can.

Second one - try to follow FPC/Lazarus development in trunk every time something is fixed. That's the way I am currently following. Unfortunately, the trunks (FPC and Lazarus) can be unstable and when something is fixed, the other existing functionality stops working. Again - that's the fact of life and I can't demand anything here.

Third alternative, which I wanted to discuss in more details, is bug-fix backporting to the last stable version. Yes, it is time-consuming and it is quite costly, but it guarantees the quality. Again, I could do it myself, keeping the patches I am interested in in a separate private repository, but :
1. I think a lot of people can be potentially interested in such repository, so the costs can be divided between the "stakeholders" and qualitative commercial support can be provided.
2. Some patches are too complex for me to maintain by myself.

Please give your suggestion for dealing with my/similar problems.

Again maybe Professional type of support can include backports service?

You do know that bug fixes are often backported if possible/feasible? E.g. currently we have the release 2.6.0, trunk and there is the fixes branch 2.6.1 which is based on 2.6.0, but contains fixes (and often features) that were merged from trunk and will be in 2.6.2 then. The fixes branches are usually more stable than trunk (though trunk of at least FPC is usually rather stable as well).

Regards,
Sven

Same for Lazarus, although the numbering is different. There is always a svn branch "fixes", while the svn "trunk" is the development version. The fixes receives only bug fixes. The release was 0.9.30. The development version was 0.9.31. Then came several minor releases 0.9.30.2,3,4,5 with fixes.
Next version is 1.0 (fixes branch), development has version 1.1 (trunk).

Mattias

It's probably fair to say that certainly not all bugfixes are backported or merged (especially in case that they require changes which are considered as possibly risky for the fixes branch), so the question is a valid one.

My original thought was that it should be better asking questions about how the support worked on the support site. After having looked at it, I understand that it might be confusing because I found no simple way for contacting the site owners for such question on that site... There is a link to the company CNOC running the site, but their WWW pages are in Dutch. Nevertheless, the Contact page on that site contains an e-mail address. I'd ask the question there (although I believe that Joost or someone else would probably read and eventually answer it here too ;-) ).

Tomas

I know about those branches.
But still, I'd like to know more about commercial support. Could you present some information about services behind it?

Not everything is backported and unfortunately fpc trunk sometimes not too stable. Especially when using templates/generics and interfaces.

Moreover, I'd like to understand the terms of support for components which are part of FPC and Lazarus.