Bountysource activity

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 18:20:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> https://www.bountysource.com/issues/1325905-shared-phobos-library-doesn-t-work-on-all-linux-distributions
>
> Over $2000 in open bounties left:
>
> https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/383571-d-programming-language

Looks like most of these are on compiler bugs.

The only Phobos one is the std.getopt one, however its situation 
is two abandoned patches and no clear goal as to what constitutes 
a change worthy of marking the issue as "fixed" and paying out 
the bounty.

As for the compiler bugs... well, all of these are HARD, at least 
from the perspective of someone inexperienced with DMD's 
codebase. If they were easy, they'd have been solved already. DMD 
is not something you can easily dive into and start moving code 
around to fix big problems. Speaking from experience, it wasn't 
once that a 50-line patch would take me days to author and debug. 
And even if I were to manage through, the chances are high that 
the patch ends up crap because you need a lot of knowledge about 
how the compiler works to understand what's a good idea, and what 
isn't. Not even Kenji's pulls are always approved.

However, the biggest problem is the open pull request count. What 
good is authoring a patch if no one wants to take time to review 
it?

IMHO, we don't need more bug bounties - we need REVIEWER 
bounties. Some way to convince more experienced D developers to 
review others' contributions. I have a number of open DMD pull 
requests myself, and sometimes I consider bribing someone to just 
look at them.