Support for 2.064.2

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 13 July 2015 at 12:30:23 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> It need not be every compiler release.  Just releases that are 
> shipped with GCC is enough to satisfy my requirements.

So, what you're looking for is that folks make sure that their 
libraries work with the version of gdc which was released with 
gcc? While I think that that's a good goal, I think that the 
reality of the matter at this point is that almost no one is 
testing their code with gdc (which is one reason why it's all the 
more important to properly unify the frontend across all three of 
the major compilers). And I expect that very few D library 
authors at this point are thinking about long term support. That 
sort of thing simply hasn't been the focus of the community as a 
whole, and most of the libraries out there are fun projects that 
someone did and put out there because they did it and want to be 
helpful, but they're likely not thinking about it like a product 
that needs to be maintained for folks who are writing long term 
projects. Something like vibe.d would likely be an exception, and 
from other posts in this thread, even it isn't thinking in terms 
of gdc or supporting anything other than the last few releases.

So, I think that to get what you're looking for is going to 
require shift of thinking in the D community. And part of that is 
really what Andrei has been looking for as he's talked about us 
becoming more professional (at least as far as the core devs and 
the official stuff goes). So, there's some push in that 
direction, but I don't think that it's sunk in all that far yet, 
honestly.

One thing that you might consider is creating a wiki page which 
discusses the long term support for what gets released with 
particular distros and what folks should arguably be targeting if 
they want their libraries or programs to really work broadly 
rather than as a simple hobby project - e.g. you should target 
these releases of dmd, gdc, and ldc, because they're in these 
major distros with long term support. Maybe we can come up with 
some sort of recommended standard for what serious libraries 
should be targeting for support and encourage folks to follow 
that. As it stands, I think that most folks simply aren't 
thinking about it, and if they had some sort of framework to 
follow, they'd be more likely to.

- Jonathan M Davis