Release process and backwards compatibility

[deadalnix]

On Saturday, 9 March 2013 at 06:07:12 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Saturday, 9 March 2013 at 05:15:12 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> I feel like a parot having to repeat the same shit again and 
>> again and again. So I wont, I expanded myself on such topic so 
>> many time already.
>>
>> See how PHP handled the transition from 4 to 5 for a good 
>> example of how it can be done.
>
> No, I'm not asking about improving the release process, I'm 
> asking how do you mitigate damage done by this specific change. 
> You can give people a compiler with some non-breaking updates 
> to delay the inevitable, but if they take this change what 
> needs to be done to make the transition easier?

Many things can be done to mitigate that stuff.

The first, obvious one, is to provide a version of the compiler 
without the fix (bug with other fixes that don't break most code).

A second thing to do is to adapt phobos to take rvalues at 
several places. (This have the problem that ranges have 
unspecified behavior when passed by value).

Finally, an useful error message, with a workaround proposal 
would be welcome,
Error, range used as lvalue. You may want to do BLAH to solve 
that.