Contributing to the compiler? Tracking suggestions?

[Bill Baxter]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
> 
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>>> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>>
>>>> There's also the tracker for D [2], but a comment on one enhancement 
>>>> proposal I saw there says that the D issue tracker is reserved for 
>>>> suggestions that received positive feedback from Walter, but many 
>>>> good ideas are just ignored by Walter until like 90% the community 
>>>> jumps up and down about it simultaneously.
>>>
>>>
>>> The suggestions for new features come in *daily*, sometimes several 
>>> times a day. It's not possible to give a thoughtful response to them 
>>> all, and it would be inappropriate to give a flip response.
>>>
>>> Let alone the impossibility of implementing all of them, or even all 
>>> the good ones.
>>>
>>> So some sort of vetting process has to happen.
>>
>>
>> Understood.  I wasn't trying to say you *should* personally respond to 
>> every single thing that comes in -- if you did, you'd waste all your 
>> time on the newsgroup, and D would never go anywhere.
>>
>> But the fact is you don't have time, and many of the suggestions seem 
>> like good ones, so the question is what's the best way to
>>
>> A) make these suggestions as digestible as possible for you (and 
>> others), [e.g. more formal proposal structure with well-considered 
>> discussion of pros-and-cons and ramifications; or say outright patches 
>> to GDC] so they have more chance of being considered/accepted.
>>
>> B) Even if not accepted make sure they get on a TODO list, somewhere, 
>> or at least TO-THINK-MORE-ABOUT list.  I personally like the wiki as a 
>> place for that, but I think that page has been around on Wiki4D for a 
>> while but gotten very little attention.
>>
>> --bb
> 
> 
> I had a similar (if not identical) idea some time ago:
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/40396.html
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DCP_Template
> 
> The base objective is the same: to flesh out, review and clean proposals 
> before they reach to Walter, as well as to avoid repeated discussion. 
> This is useful mostly only for complicated proposals or when there is 
> some disagreement in the community.
> 
> As for point B), it would be an index of the TODOs/Change-Proposals, 
> similar to http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?IdeaDiscussion and 
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?PendingPeeves (this latter one 
> has become mostly obsolete with the emergence of the D bugzilla)

What's the policy for the bugzilla?  Because really, wiki is a pretty 
painful way to keep track of data like this.  I tinkered with the change 
proposals page a little bit, and that big table gets out of date really 
easily.  If those things all went into bugzilla instead the tracking 
would be much easier.  People who care about particular propoals could 
sign up for email updates on particular issues, Walter could add 
comments like "sorry, this is never going to happen", priorities could 
be assigned, reports could be generated automatically, etc.

I don't really see why all the things on the features request wiki page 
couldn't just all be added as enhancement requests.  Don commented on 
one item in the tracker that the tracker should be used only for 
proposals that Walter agreed to or something like that.  But why? 
Trackers are meant for tracking all kinds of proposals and feature 
requests and bugs.  Why not let them all go there (for anyone who feels 
like bothering to file a ticket for their particular pet feature)?

If they shoulnd't be mixed in indiscriminately with "Walter-accepted" 
enhancement proposals, then make a separate tracker category like 
"feature idea" or "vague wish".

--bb