Moving to D

[David Nadlinger]

On 1/6/11 11:47 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Mercurial on dsource.org …

Personally, I'd really like to persuade Walter, you, and whoever else 
actually decides this to consider hosting the main repository at an 
external place like GitHub or Mercurial, because DSource has been having 
some real troubles with stability, although it got slightly better again 
recently. The problem is somewhat alleviated when using a DVCS, but 
having availabilities the main source repositories is not quite the best 
form of advertisement for a language.

Additionally, the UI of GitHub supports the scenario where only a few 
people (or Walter alone) actually have commit/push access to the main 
repository really well through cheap forks which stay logically 
connected to he main repository and merge requests. The ability to make 
comments on specific (lines in) commits, also in combination with pull 
requests, is awesome as well.

I would also like to suggest Git over Mercurial, though this is mostly 
personal preference – it is used more widely, it has GitHub and 
Gitorious (I'm having a hard time finding Bitbucket comparable 
personally), it's proven to work well in settings where the main tree is 
managed by a single person (->Linux), it tries not artificially 
restricting you as much as possible (something I imagine Walter might 
like), … – but again, it's probably a matter of taste, I don't want to 
start a flamewar here.

The most important thing to me is, however, that I'd really like to see 
a general shift in the way D development is done towards more 
contributor-friendliness. I can only bow to Walter as a very capable and 
experienced compiler writer, but as it was discussed several times here 
on the list as well, in my opinion D has reached a point where it 
desperately needs to win new contributors to the whole ecosystem. There 
is a reason why other open source projects encourage you to write 
helpful commit messages, and yet we don't even have tags for releases 
(!) in the DMD repository.

I didn't intend to offend anybody at all, but I'd really hate to see D2 
failing to »take off« for reasons like this…

David