There are currently two charting components in Lazarus: TAChart and TBarChart.

TBarChart is much simpler, and is roughly equivalent in functionality to a TAChart with a single BarSeries rotated 90 degrees to the right.

Since I maintain TAChart, Lazaurs team assumed that I maintain TBarChart too, as evidenced by these issues:

http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=15997
http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=14190

At various times, TBarChart users requested features available in TAChart:

http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,5203.0.html http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,8817.0.html

I think that overall, TBarChart creates more confusion than value, and so suggest to take some (or all) of the following steps:

0) Make sure TAChart have a strict superset of TBarChart's features (I think I already did that, see http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=14190)
1) Move TBarChart from 'Additional' tab to 'Chart' tab
2) Deprecate TBarChart by adding appropriate comments and/or "deprecated" modifier (although it seems that FPC does not allow to declare a class deprecated).
3) Move TBarChart from LCL to a separate package not installed by default.
4) Remove TBarChart altogether.

Alexander Klenin wrote

2) Deprecate TBarChart by adding appropriate comments and/or "deprecated" modifier (although it seems that FPC does not allow to declare a class deprecated).

type
   TBarChart = class
   end deprecated;

This must work. Note no semicolon between end and deprecated.

Best regards,
Paul Ishenin.