DMD needs branches

[BCS]

Reply to 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
> 


A "known good vertion" list for dsource would get much of that.