Martin Nowak is officially MIA

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

Thanks all for the feedback; a follow up is in order seeing as there are 
a few misunderstandings of the situation.

First off, framing this matter as impinging on someone's vacation is a 
misinterpretation. Taking time off has nothing to do with it - anyone 
should. Just Walter, myself, the "This Week in D" author, and the 
release manager please let us know so things can be planned accordingly.

To thrive, we need to expand the inner circle of folks who are closely 
involved with D to the extent the community knows why they're missing 
when they're missing. Currently that circle includes only Walter and 
myself; if either of us would go dark for weeks without the other (and 
others) knowing, that'd be worrisome.

To wit, I wrote this to Martin and Walter on May 31st:

====
Today is May 31st, so we're entering the last month of H1. I'd like to 
get an early start on updating the vision document, and before creating 
yet another rambling thread on the forum I thought we should start 
between the three of us.

What do you guys think would be the main points to attack in H2? Martin, 
it's particularly important to hear from you.
====

I hope it's clearer that it was quite unsettling to not hear back about 
that or anything else.

Regarding the volunteer vs. paid employee aspect - clearly that's a 
problem. All I can do now is work on the foundation and hope to find 
sponsors that would allow us to pay the release manager, the keeper of 
"This Week in D" and others.

About the privacy aspect - the forum post came after repeated fruitless 
attempts of private contact. Addressing matters in person, privately, is 
of course the right way and the one I've tried through all channels I 
could think of.

Building the process is a difficult and very important job. It stands to 
reason, then, that we need several folks who can do it and cover 
contingencies. Martin and I are in talks about building this release 
together; it would be great if we could get a broader participation.

There's one more note of interest:

> This is off-putting for me as someone who is getting steadily more
> involved in D, what other implicit contracts do you think we've all
> signed?

None, of course. Far as I can tell the dynamics are as follows:

* Walter and I can be counted on being around barring announced absences 
or exceptional circumstances.

* Adam D. Ruppe, Walter, and I discussed that there will be consistency 
of "This Week in D". Announced outages are fine, "I'll do it when/if I 
get to it" is not.

* The release managers should be counted on for planning and reliably 
carrying the release. I am now sorry I wasn't clearer about that.

* There are a few folks with particularly important roles: Iain (GDC), 
Kai (LDC), Brad (autotester), and Vladimir (forum and a variety of 
tools). If any of these would suddenly leave, the community would be in 
difficulty. They work independently and I wish we found ways to pay them 
and coordinate better with them, but there is no implied or express 
expectation.

* There are a number of heavy-hitting contributors (such as Daniel, 
Kenji, and about a dozen others) who have a strong positive impact. 
Again there is no expectation they're around.

* Up-and-coming contributors are always welcome and we should improve 
our tooling to make it easy for anyone to contribute.

Probably the best action item is this:

> I would like to ask, what can we improve in our tooling and
> infrastructure to lessen the burden on release czars? I know nightly
> builds have been discussed for years, and it would be great to take
> advantage of the multi-platform infrastructure of the current
> autotester for it, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Yah, ideally the autotester would just build the release as well for 
each platform on the same machines it's using. Sadly Brad wouldn't want 
to take that task.

One thing I'll be trying to work on with Martin is a directory under 
tools/ that contains reasonably stable release building scripts for all 
platforms.


Andrei