The new std.process is ready for review

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 06:46:13PM -0800, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Saturday, February 23, 2013 18:39:10 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > Alternatively, I would push for renaming the old std.process to
> > something like old.process (or something else), which is much less
> > of a breakage than deleting it from Phobos outright -- existing code
> > just need to have their imports fixed and will continue working,
> > whereas deleting the module outright leaves existing code with no
> > recourse but to potentially rewrite from scratch. This may be easier
> > to convince Walter & Andrei on, than outright killing old deprecated
> > modules.
> 
> Possibly, but Walter takes a very dim view on most any code breakage,
> even if it means simply changing a makefile to make your code work
> again, so I'd be very surprised if he thought that moving the current
> std.process would be acceptable. If Andrei could be convinced, then we
> could probably do it, but I wouldn't expect him to agree, and IIRC, he
> had no problem with the std.process2 scheme and might even have
> suggested it. So, I suspect that your only hope of avoiding
> std.process2 is if you can come up with a better name.
[...]

I suppose std.proc is out of the question? ;-)

I find this rather frustrating... sometimes it feels like Phobos is
suffering from premature standardization - we have a module with a
design that isn't very good, but just because it somehow got put into
Phobos, now it has to stick, no matter what. That's what we should do
*after* we have a good design, but at this point, the current
std.process clearly isn't ready to be cast in stone yet, yet we insist
it can't be changed (at least, not easily). So every little design
mistake that got overlooked in review and made it into Phobos becomes
stuck, even when the design is really only experimental to begin with.

I think we should seriously consider the idea someone brought up in this
forum recently, of an experimental section of Phobos where new stuff is
put in, and subject to actual field-testing (as opposed to just toy test
cases when it was written), before it goes into Phobos proper. I really
do not want to see this problem repeated over and over, and we end up
with 15 modules with 2 or 3 appended to their name just because nothing
can be changed after it's put in. It really detracts from D's
presentability, esp. to outsiders and prospective new users, IMO.


T

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