dmd development model.

[Eldar Insafutdinov]

This has been raised numerous times by many people before, but still I'm going to write it. The last three releases are broken for both QtD and tango. Why is it happening? I see the reason in the dmd development model. Say dmd 2.031 works for a project (which can be a large one). The consequent release 2.032 does not. If you make a diff between the two versions it's considerably large. How are we supposed to locate the regression?

If dmd delepers contributed every change to the VCS separately, it would be much easier to track down the change that caused the issue. From my side I could test the version of dmd from trunk every 2 days and file bugs as they appear. That's how most of the open source projects work, and this model works fine. Few days before the release there can be an appropriate notice, so that people could test their code. That would make dmd releases less buggy. I know that Walter sends the compiler to tango devs prior to release, but that's not a robust solution to the problem, developers may not have time at the moment for example. However with the truly open model not only core developers of projects, but anyone can test the compiler.

What we have now is annoying. We have a series of non-working releases. LDC for example still hasn't updated it's front-end since dmd 1.045. Putting dmd to svn was a great move, but without adopting the advantages of VCS it's rather useless.

Thank you,
Eldar.