Wannabe contributor frustrations

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 11 February 2016 at 12:08:53 UTC, Márcio Martins 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 11 February 2016 at 11:47:23 UTC, Vladimir 
> Panteleev wrote:
>> On Thursday, 11 February 2016 at 10:55:12 UTC, Márcio Martins 
>> wrote:
>>> Is there a practical reason why they are not in the same repo?
>>
>> No, other than trying to put them into one would grind 
>> everything to a halt for a while and would probably cost us 
>> more than we'd win. (All pull requests would need to be 
>> recreated, for one, and a lot of tools will break.)
>
> Would at having them as submodules of dmd ease everything?
> They could be separate repos, but the makefiles would try to 
> find them in the submodule location and if there, great, 
> otherwise, keep business.

The makefiles already assume that all components are cloned in 
one repository (but this can be overridden with make variables).

> On a separate topic: are the official DMD releases compiled 
> with the previous version of DMD or GDC? How does that work?

Yes, with a previous DMD version. IIRC, there is a makefile 
target which downloads an older DMD, if necessary.