D's greatest mistakes

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/29/10 5:48 AM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> The licensing issues with DMD. I get the feeling we would have many
> more contributors to the reference compiler and have bugs fixed at a
> much faster rate than right now. Walter is already working at 110% of
> his abilities, at least that's the impression I get. I think maybe D2
> has grown beyond anyone's expectations, so now the compiler team
> (Walter&  Don I guess?) has to chase down all the features that D2 is
> supossed to have and implement them.
>
> I don't think its feasible for such a small team to fix that many bugs
> for a huge language like D2, at least not in a short-term timeline.
> And Bugzilla seems to grow day by day with no end in sight.

One metric I proposed to Walter is the "bug age", i.e. the date of the 
oldest unfixed bug. If we prioritize bugs by importance first and 
chronological second, I think we can get into a schedule that 
systematically reduces the age of the oldest bug and then keep it 
constant. Right now the process of choosing which bug to fix next is 
unstructured.

Andrei