Should D1 only bugs be closed?

[David Nadlinger]

On Saturday, 9 February 2013 at 22:30:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> D1 is no longer officially supported. There are a couple users 
> of D1 still (like Don), and it would be discourteous to try to 
> purge D1. The point of using git is that branches can exist and 
> be amended if a reason comes up to do so.

I know, you've mentioned it as a side note on some 
dmd-internals/GitHub discussion.

Note that even though I would obviously love to see more 
corporate users contributing to D2, I'm not at all trying to 
discourage Don, Leandro and the others from Sociomantic from 
continuing to work on D1.

There just has not really been an official announcement regarding 
the ongoing D1 development, and what form it will continue in.

> I don't see how anyone has been damaged or even inconvenienced 
> here.

I think a lack of clear communication in this area can be a 
threat in two ways:

First, from how discussions in the different online fora usually 
go, the D development is not exactly perceived as principled or 
organized by many outsiders. And seemingly continuing to support 
a product after its firmly announced discontinuation date is only 
going to add to that, as Russel noted earlier.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, such situations will 
almost invariably startle the developer community, as evidenced 
by the posts in this thread, and the (as usual, slightly ... 
direct) "wtf is Walter doing" messages that have been popping up 
on IRC lately.

I don't want to make it seem as if I knew it all and had the 
answer to all process-related questions; I certainly don't and 
there are many people here who are much more experienced in the 
various aspects of software development than I am. But I *do* 
think that I have recognized the vital importance of 
communication to the success of any big problem (open source or 
not). And, as I think I mentioned elsewhere recently, it occurs 
to me that a lack or delay in communication has been the 
recurring theme in many of the more unfortunate turns and missed 
opportunities in D's history.

In retrospect, some of my recent messages might have turned out a 
little bit too blunt. Please accept my apologies, I just tried to 
state my opinion clearly and did not intend to offend anybody. 
But I'd hate to see the same story being repeated all over again, 
and it seems that unfortunately it is the most direct queries 
that tend receive a response the fastest...

David