If I had my way

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, December 11, 2011 16:10:47 Dejan Lekic wrote:
> > I confess that I don't see the point in delaying the current
> > release for this. It's nearly ready. It seems to me that it
> 
> Compiler and runtime-library projects should never release
> "nearly ready" versions. Some higher level library projects may
> have that luxury, but compiler/run-time library, never! It should
> be released when it IS ready. Not earlier.
> 
> Problem with D and Phobos is that there is no clear roadmap (or
> at least I am not aware of its existence). So please tell me how
> you guys know if dmd+phobos is ready to be released or not when
> there was no plan on what this release is all about (apart from
> the list of issues on bugzilla)???

1. It's "nearly" ready, not ready, so it hasn't been put out the door yet.

2. What does ready mean anyway? In this case, it means that enough time has 
passed since the last release that it makes sense to make another release and 
no major regressions have been introduced (and preferably no regressions at 
all).

If you're looking for the compiler's released to be delayed until it works 
perfectly, it'll never be released. Not only does every compiler on the planet 
have bugs in it, but in order to find most bugs, people need to use the 
compiler in all of the diverse situations that compilers get used in.

dmd has been steadily improving - and at a very high rate as well. Delaying 
this release for a few days to try and fix a few specific bugs doesn't really 
hurt, since there's no hard release schedule, but it's also a bit odd, since 
we've already gone through the necessary beta testing and were about to put it 
out the door. But for better or worse, Andrei and Walter decided to delay the 
release to deal with some of the bugs which Mehrdad was complaining about 
rather than just fixing them for 2.058. Delaying the release means that more 
buigs will be fixed in the next release, but it also means that those using the 
official releases (as opposed to the latest on github) have to wait that much 
longer for all of the fixes that have already been implemented for the next 
release. So, it's not clear which is better.

As for a roadmap, what would you want on it? For the most part, D isn't 
getting new features at this point. A few features aren't fully implemented 
yet, but aside from that it's all bug fixing. And those tend to get fixed when 
they get fixed. Having a roadmap for that sort of thing is difficult. At best, 
Walter could indicate what was being focused on. And with so many of the fixes 
now coming from the community, it becomes that much more difficult to have any 
kind of roadmap about what's going to be fixed next.

The one thing that I can think of which probably should be done would be to 
have a clearer plan about when releases are targeted for rather than Walter 
just deciding at some point that enough time has passed since the previous 
release to have another one (generally 1 - 2 months). But I don't know what he 
could really be putting on a roadmap, since it's all bug fixing now and not new 
feature development.

- Jonathan M Davis