Final by default?

[Kapps]

On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 05:15:58 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> Regarding user retention... I've spent the past N months 
> beginning the process of selling D at work.  The language and 
> library are at a point of maturity where I think it might have 
> a chance when evaluated simply on the merits of the language 
> itself.  However, what has me really hesitant to put my 
> shoulder behind D and really push isn't that changes occur 
> sometimes.  Even big changes.  It's how they're handled.  
> Issues come up in the newsgroup and are discussed back and 
> forth for ages.  Seriously considered.  And then maybe a 
> decision is apparently reached (as with this virtual by default 
> thing) and so I expect that action will be taken.  And then 
> nothing happens.  And other times big changes occur with 
> seemingly little warning.  Personally, I don't really require 
> perfect compatibility between released, but I do want to see 
> things moving decisively in a clearly communicated direction.  
> I want to know where we're going and how we're going to get 
> there, and if that means that I have to hold on moving to a new 
> compiler release for a while while I sort out changes that's 
> fine.  But I want to be able to prepare for it.

I agree with this, in particular issues where a conclusion is 
reached that are then ignored for months or years. This is 
something that the preapproved Bugzilla tag should be able to 
help with, but I'm not sure how much it's being used in 
situations like this. In this example, Walter mentioned that he 
was essentially convinced to the change, then the thread faded 
off and the issue was ignored. This was over 9 months ago. There 
was no mention of whether this is something that would be done 
(or accepted if the community implements the change), it just 
reached a conclusion that made it seem like the change was likely 
and then it got set aside like many similar issues. In this case, 
eventually a pull request was made to begin the change process, 
which then sat there for over three months until it was merged, 
at which point Andrei mentioned his disapproval / rejection. Had 
this pull not gotten merged (whether it goes into an actual 
release or not), it would be just another topic that's discussed, 
seems like it's accepted, then is completely ignored.