DMD needs branches

[janderson]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Chris Miller wrote:
>> I know, I know, report bugs. This doesn't cut it. Reporting bugs is 
>> hard as hell and time consuming. I need time to report bugs. Now I 
>> have to either restrict use to specific compiler versions, which 
>> people don't always know about and report their issues back to me, 
>> until I remind them they need to downgrade their compiler (which isn't 
>> always an option if they need bug fixes), or I have to rush to fix my 
>> code to workaround such issues and report bugs. If there was a stable 
>> branch, I could get the code working with the unstable branch at a 
>> reasonable pace.
> 
> Please let me know which issues are breaking your code. I'll be sure 
> they get in the test suite so they'll never break again.


Here's a crazy idea.  Why not have all big libraries in some mega test 
suite.  You would only run this test on -v1 just before you release a 
new version (because it would take so long with 100 odd projects).  At 
the very least you could capture all the compile-time errors that way 
(and possibly runtime too).

Perhaps the D community could figure out a way to get this to you. 
Maybe they could even provide the test suit and continually add 
libraries to it themselves until it contains 100+ libraries.  It might 
even be a way to indicate which libraries work in which versions.  It 
would be updated frequently.

I guess this could kinda working like that translation system someone 
mentions a while back, which simply used a massive amount of data to get 
around the translation problem.

-Joel