Hiatus, Improving Participation in D Development

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 15-07-2012 06:02, dsimcha wrote:
> I've been on somewhat of a hiatus these past few months and have only
> worked on D-related development sporadically.  There are several reasons
> for my absence, some of which will hopefully change soon, and I hope to
> make a comeback.  Below are the reasons why my contributions have
> declined and some suggestions for improvements to the D community where
> the issues aren't specific to me:
>
> 0.  There's a lot less stuff that's broken or missing now than a few
> years ago when I started contributing.  This has led to a mild
> complacency as D is already awesome.  For example, it's been a long time
> since I hit a compiler bug that caused me significant hassle.

Indeed! Things have gotten a lot better as of late.

>
> 1.  I'm writing my Ph.D. thesis and looking for jobs.  I still have some
> time to contribute, but D development isn't the top idea in my mind due
> to these distractions.  This is in some ways the root of the problem, as
> I have less time and mental energy to keep up with D through informal
> channels.  I think my job search is over, though, so that's one less
> distraction.
>
> 2.  Because I'm writing my thesis, I don't program much for my research
> anymore.  I therefore don't notice little things that are broken or get
> cool ideas from other languages as often.  To make it easier for someone
> to find bugs and enchancement requests in areas he/she is already
> familiar with, I'd like to see an ability to search by module (for
> Phobos/druntime) or feature (for DMD) in Bugzilla.  For example, in
> Phobos I'm most familiar with std.range, std.algorithm, std.parallelism
> and std.functional.  I'd like to be able to easily query a list of bugs
> specific to those modules.

+1.

>
> 3.  As the community has grown larger, more people besides me have
> stepped up.  Of course this is a good thing.  The only downside is that
> I've lost track of who's working on what, what its status is, what still
> needs to be done, and what the holdups are.  Perhaps we need some
> central place other than this newsgroup where this information is posted
> for key D projects.  For example, we'd have a page that says "Person X
> is working on a new std.xml.  Here's the Github repository.  It's
> stalled because noone can agree on a design for Y."  We should also
> maintain a slightly more formal wishlist of stuff that noone's working
> on that's waiting to be done.

We should use Trello much more than we do now: https://trello.com/dlang

I've also been keeping an eye on Phabricator (http://phabricator.org)...

>
> BTW, if noone is working on a new std.xml anymore, I might want to
> start.  I interviewed for a job where they wanted me to do a small
> prototype as part of the hiring process that involved parsing XML.  I
> was allowed to use any language I wanted.  I think my D projects played
> a large role in me getting an offer, but I couldn't use it for the
> prototype because std.xml is so bad.  I ended up using Python instead.
>
> 4.  The release cycle has slowed greatly.  What happened here?  The 1-2
> month release cycles were a good motivator because they created mild
> deadline pressure to get features and fixes checked in before the next
> release.

I'm not actually sure what happened here. I suspect the problem is that 
most people are against releasing with regressions, but there's no one 
to actually fix them.

>
> 5.  The amount of stuff on this forum and the mailing lists has become
> overwhelming.  I've recently remedied this to a small degree by
> unsubscribing from dmd-internals.  I've never been a contributor to the
> compiler itself and had only subscribed to this list to track bug fixes
> and 64-bit support implementation.  Now, the signal-to-noise ratio of my
> inbox is good enough that I actually read the Phobos and druntime stuff
> again instead of just glossing over all my D-related email.
>
> As far as this forum, I suggest a split something like the following, so
> that it has a better signal-to-noise ratio from the perspective of
> people with specific interests:
>
> D.language-design:  Long, complicated threads about language features
> and the theory behind them belong here.
>
> D.phobos-design:  Since the Phobos mailing list is intended mostly for
> regular contributors and is focused on individual pull requests and
> commits, this is where high-level design stuff would get discussed
> w.r.t. Phobos.
>
> D.ecosystem:  Stuff about third-party libraries, Deimos, toolchains,
> etc. goes here.
>
> D.adoption:  Discussions about why D was or wasn't adopted for a given
> project and how to increase its adoption go here.
>
> D.learn:  Questions about using D.  We already have this, but we need to
> encourage people to use it more instead of posting to the main group.

I agree with all of these. The main D newsgroup has way too many things 
going on at the same time. We've needed this split badly for a while.

I would also suggest a forum for druntime/GC development and design. 
Whether it would be used, I don't know, but I think it's worth trying. 
Sometimes it's hard to get replies on the druntime mailing list, and I 
think a newsgroup would help here, since it's more persistent in nature.

-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex at lycus.org
http://lycus.org