etc vs. package mangers

[Dicebot]

On Sunday, 6 October 2013 at 21:32:25 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
> On 10/6/13 1:41 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 10/6/13 10:10 AM, David Nadlinger wrote:
>>> On Sunday, 6 October 2013 at 17:08:25 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
>>> Wakeling wrote:
>>>> isn't this really what has just been discussed under the 
>>>> proposed name
>>>> of stdx?
>>>>
>>>> ... and if so, why isn't it being used?
>>>
>>> This is exactly why I'm not too thrilled to make another 
>>> attempt at
>>> establishing something like that. ;)
>>
>> We could improve things on our end by featuring etc 
>> documentation more prominently etc. I don't
>> think there's a need to reboot things with stdx. Just improve 
>> etc.
>>
>> Andrei
>
> I'm largely staying out of this conversation, but there's one 
> area that I think is pretty important, speed of development.
>
> By having a less official, more readily committable to, 
> repository it stands to reason that it'll evolve faster and 
> fluidly than the phobos code base docs or should.  Some of it 
> is just that phobos pull requests lanquish too long, but that's 
> not ALL it is.  The bar should be different, not that phobos' 
> bar should be lower.
>
> My 2 cents,
> Brad

This.

The very point of such category is to provide more flexible and 
still officially approved source for not-yet-there modules. 
Whatever the reason is that prevents it from straightforward 
inclusion, it is likely to be reason for plenty of commits to the 
module. Limiting its polishing to Phobos release model hinders 
core rationale for having such semi-official module list - 
ability of module author to polish it in his own tempo using more 
extensive field test results.

I actually kind of think "etc." should be deprecated and 
eventually removed from Phobos at all. For C bindings we now have 
Deimos, for experimental packages it simply does not work that 
good.