Final by default?

Peter Alexander peter.alexander.au at gmail.com
Thu Mar 13 01:47:11 PDT 2014


On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 08:16:50 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 3/13/14, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>> I didn't even know about this client before the breakage.
>
> I'm really getting tired of this argument. An unknown client 
> (which
> you still haven't named, so as far as I'm concerned it might as 
> well
> be just a reddit troll) comes out of the blue, complains about 
> some
> small breakage which can *easily* be fixed in a point release, 
> and
> suddenly that has to affect the decision on final by default. 
> Also,
> the client hasn't bothered to file a bug report, and 2.056 has 
> been
> released for a few weeks (nevermind the massively long beta 
> cycle).
>
> Why not do the obvious and just roll out the point release with 
> the
> std.json fixes?
>
> I only see this as getting worse, however. I mean the whole 
> idea of
> client X deciding to ring up Andrei or Walter, NDAs to not 
> disclose
> their name, and make an executive decision on some 
> language/phobos
> feature.
>
> Meanwhile, who's fixing the bugs and implementing features? 
> People who
> are not on a payroll. So I think we the community and the 
> developers
> have a right for a vote.

To be honest, whether or not the client really exists is 
irrelevant. We can't just keep making large breaking changes.

It's not just big companies that are effected either. Every 
breaking change potentially breaks some open source library. If 
that library is no longer maintained then it just stops working, 
and no one knows until a user comes along and tries to compile 
it. When it fails to compile, most users will just assume it 
doesn't work and move on. If that library was critical to their 
project then we probably lose a user.

As for the release time and beta: most people aren't on the 
forums daily. They don't know this is happening. The people on 
this forum are not representative D users.

I occasionally run Python scripts at work. I can assure you I 
have absolutely no idea when Python is going to get an update and 
I certainly have no idea when beta tests periods are being run!


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