Wannabe contributor frustrations

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 10 February 2016 at 23:30:03 UTC, Márcio Martins 
wrote:
> I decided to try a couple ideas in druntime and followed this 
> http://wiki.dlang.org/Starting_as_a_Contributor#Fetch_dmd_from_GitHub
>
> Everything went fast and smooth - I have a custom built dmd 
> version.
> Bootstrapping and building dmd was suspiciously fast - took 
> around 15 secs maybe, if I remember right,
>
>
> I did my changes to druntime, rebuilt with make -f posix.mak
>
> Compiled a test case with ../dmd/src/dmd test.d, but my changes 
> were not reflected.
>
> So, I double check I actually did recompile druntime and look 
> for the output lib files, and immediately thought that it must 
> be picking up the system include and lib paths instead of this 
> development env.
>
> I create a dmd.conf in ../dmd/src right next to my custom dmd 
> binary, but still doesn't work.
> I try again invoking ../dmd/src/dmd -conf=../dmd/src/dmd.conf 
> but still nothing.
> I try passing the -I and -L arguments in the command line but 
> still it is not using my custom druntime.
>
> At this point I flip the table and give up - what could I be 
> doing wrong?
>
> My expectation was that given I followed the official 
> "tutorial" closely, everything was going to just work, instead 
> I spent about 2 hours on this and got nowhere...
>
> dmd should have a verbose mode where it outputs what it's 
> trying to do and with which settings, so I could have a chance 
> at seeing what I have messed up, and what linker command it is 
> invoking, ... as it is, I felt totally in the dark, and that 
> just adds to the frustration.
>
> I am on Ubuntu 15 and got a system-wide dmd installed from the 
> official .deb package.

When you figure it out maybe you could draft a clear explanation 
of whats missing from the existing wiki instructions to append as 
a set of hints and tips.

One of the biggest problems with explaining things is that it's 
hard to remember what it was like not to know something, and so 
experts can often be terrible at explaining things because it 
seems obvious (and as Ray Charles said, everything is easy when 
you know how to do it).