Moving towards D2 2.061 (and D1 1.076)

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 01:05:21AM +0100, deadalnix wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 December 2012 at 23:47:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> >It's Remedy Games. It's a big deal for them, and their use of D is
> >a big deal for us, big enough that we can bend our procedure for
> >them. They were also under severe time pressure. They began using
> >UDAs the same day I implemented them. Remedy could very well be
> >the tipping point for D, and I'm not going to allow them to fail.
> >
> >It's also not a conflict of interest - what they want from D is
> >really what we all want from it.
> >
> >I understand that some of you may be frustrated by my giving their
> >needs priority, but I hope that the end result will be better for
> >all of us than if I didn't, and that you'll indulge me with this.
> 
> You have to understand that this isn't their need that is important
> here. They need stuff that we mostly all need, so I tend to agree.
> The fact is that you unilaterally decide to give that priority, when
> we are not even aware of them or of their needs. And that is the
> problem.
> 
> I understand that this game is a big deal for D and I'm all for
> supporting that effort. But, it can't be done against the community,
> or you'll alienate everybody here.
> 
> We all here are trying to support D in different ways, but if we are
> not aware of the goals, it simply will not work. You will ends up
> with a fork continuing that way, and I think phobos vs Tango for D1
> was already enough.
> 
> Isn't it preferable to help them to migrate to the new syntax rather
> than bringing everybody in the same boat ? The feature hasn't been
> released, so I'm pretty sure most D actor don't have a lot of them
> in their codebase, which make the support into the transition easy.
> 
> Introducing new deprecated feature into a release seems completely
> backward to me, and reading other comment, it seems that I'm not the
> only one. We should consider other solutions before sticking to that
> one. And you have to work with D community on that one, or you'll
> loose it.

This just underscores our desperate need to start implementing a sane
release process, as proposed by the ongoing discussion in the PROCESS
thread.

And now is about the most critical time for us to start doing this.
We're on the verge of possibly hitting it big, and so big changes in the
community are likely to be on the horizon. To deal with the influx of
users that will very likely flood in when the news about Remedy adopting
D goes out, we better get our act together NOW and start using a sane
release process.  Otherwise, D's potentially big break in terms of
adoption may turn out to break D, possibly fatally.

The current proposal is being drafted up on the wiki:

	http://wiki.dlang.org/Release_Process

It would be very helpful if the core developers (esp. Andrei, who is
apparently supposed to head this up) gave some input as to whether the
proposal is workable, and/or what needs to be fixed or changed in order
for make it workable.

I don't think it's an overstatement to say that we desperately need to
get this worked out, the sooner the better. It had better be implemented
by the time the influx of users comes, otherwise D may never get rid of
the bad reputation of releases being badly managed (no matter what the
actual situation is).


T

-- 
The best way to destroy a cause is to defend it poorly.