(sorry for the delay, we were having roadmap discussions in FPC core) > I soon have to commit my choice of FreePascal version to have installed on the laptops of our new first-year students coming this fall. > Furthermore, the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) this year > is taking place in September, and software versions are in the process > of being decided. > > For the IOI, it is not so important to have Delphi compatibility, > but for my education it is.
Delphi compat is at all time high in 1.9.x. So I definitely would suggest taking the newest 1.9.x snapshot, and postpone it as long as possible. Usually, the faculty dependant part of the images is made quite late in the summer holidays, so maybe even 1.9.6 can be doable. However maybe it would be better to ship 1.9.4 that has been out a while than a 1.9.6 that is brand new. > For the IOI, it looks like we'll stick to 1.0.10 (unless a stable > release will appear "soon"). 1.9.x is undoubtedly more stable than 1.0.10. The stability criteria for 2.0 are simply higher, which is why 1.9.x are still branded beta's. 1.0.10 is now already off lifesupport, and quite a lot of the users are already using 1.9.x beta releases. In august this percentage will be even higher. What to do with IOI depends on how usable 1.0.10 is for that kind of purposes. (if it was ok the other years, then stick to it). However at some point there must be a transition to 1.9.x/2.0 too for IOI, so even if you choose 1.0.10 because it is a known factor, get some 1.9.x testing process running for IOI too. > For my teaching, I would prefer a 1.9. (or 2.0 ??) version. > What are the current development/release plans? Which 1.9 version > is sufficiently stable? 1.9.4 very soon now (as in the coming days), and other 1.9.x versions every 2 months (but that usually slips a few weeks/months). 2.0 is not expected before september, but throughout the beta cycle, the stability improves quickly, so the last beta's just before 2.0 are expected to be more about release engineering, IDE and improving the new support on the new architectures than about the normal release stuff. P.s. some roadmap schedules are at http://www.freepascal.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Road_to_2.0 Marco van de Voort ([EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]) _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
