New DIP73: D Drafting Library

Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Feb 5 16:45:15 PST 2015


On 2/5/15 4:08 PM, Zach the Mystic wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 February 2015 at 23:35:04 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> No, you get it wrong. This is decided exclusively community voting.
>> Andrei or Walter can veto something that they don't want but their
>> explicit approval is not required.
>
> I'm surprised. From my point of view, yours is a bad strategy. What
> bothers me is how could a module just take Walter or Andrei completely
> by surprise and still end up in the standard library? I honestly
> wouldn't want that, and yet apparently it's possible. Now don't get me
> wrong. I do think listening to the community is critical, and allowing a
> new module because of overwhelming popular demand is also acceptable,
> provided there's no reason to veto it.

D is a collaborative project and it's obvious that at some point control 
and trust need to be distributed to foster faster growth and broader 
participation.

Walter and I have been occasionally appalled by stuff that made it in 
Phobos - as was this recent case with @trusted functions that can't be 
trusted nonsense - but by and large the good overwhelms the not-so-good. 
I trust close contributors who have historically done good work to 
continue doing so, and we can delegate certain tasks to folks. As a 
simple example I trust Martin and Rainer to do good work on the GC and 
review each other's work.

> But to me, that veto means a whole lot. It means that people can't know
> what will be rejected or accepted unless told, and in the absence of
> being told, the motivation to work on something may dry up. That's what
> I'm trying to prevent by my strong insistence on the necessity of
> leadership.

It is clear we have historically a less than stellar record of good 
leadership. We plan to improve dramatically on that starting January - 
of this year :o) - and there are a few good early signs that we hope 
will develop into successful patterns.

There's no need to fear rejection. There's always code.dlang.org and as 
I said: you can trust me to recognize great work when I see it. So 
there's definitely no need to ask for permission.

One thing we'll try more of is being more decisive instead of letting 
options linger forever. Sometimes we just say "we support this" or "we 
don't support that" and our quest for the community is to understand 
that "no" is sometimes necessary for focusing on the "yes".

> The way I see it, the conversation about what is suitable for a standard
> library should come first. Someone should propose something, get a
> signal on prospects for inclusion, and then use that signal do determine
> whether to keep developing the library for phobos or not. Without the
> signal, how will they know whether to develop it for phobos or just for
> their own 3rd-party use? How do you get a clear signal when the module
> is only voted on at the *end* of the process?

Just use code.dlang.org. It's perfect either as a place for good work 
and a stepping stone toward the standard library.


Andrei



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list