Finalizing D2

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Jason House (jason.james.house at gmail.com)'s article
> Andrei has indicated that the current plan is to finalize D2 when his book comes
out.
> Given this, I'm interested in what _community_ activity should be done as part
of this.
> Should there be a formal review and polishing of the D spec? More than just
criticizing faults, people should submit patches or open a discussion of what
something means. Unimplemented features should be clearly marked or removed.

Given that it's a fairly daunting task to review every dark corner of the spec, I
think D2 will initially need to be declared somewhere between alpha and stable,
i.e. beta, at least for a while.  This means no changes that break code in
non-trivial ways, i.e. ways that require significant portions to be redesigned,
but things like bug fixes that break a few corner cases that rely on the bug are ok.

> Should the final freezing of D2 be delayed until major D1 libraries port to D2?
I'm mostly thinking of Tango, but I bet there are others. It may even be good if
major libraries could use a Phobos-compatible license and become part of the
releases by digital mars.

Good question, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem.  My gut feeling is that D2
must be frozen so that it's not a moving target and those ports can happen.  On
the other hand, if the Tango people need one or two small changes to the core
language to simplify their port, it could be worth implementing.  On the other
hand, the Tango people have been pretty clear about what they need, which is
mostly a stable spec and one or two small enhancements that have already been
filed in Bugzilla.

Also, I think it would be worth it to eventually nominate a few generally useful
modules from various community-developed libs for inclusion in Phobos, but
non-breaking additions to Phobos don't really need to be completed before D2 is
finalized.

> Can we generate a bugfix most wanted list? The formal list could inspire patches
by motivated community members. There should be a quality requirement and a review
process for submissions.

This is pretty much already done via the voting feature in Bugzilla.