Dealing with Autodecode

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, June 01, 2016 21:42:49 Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 6/1/2016 8:51 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 02:36:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> >> PRs please!
> >
> > https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4384
> >
> > You'll notice it is closed.
> >
> > Now, that one wasn't meant to be merged anyway, but Andrei seems to have
> > zero interest in actually accepting the change. That doesn't encourage
> > further work.
> Andrei is in favor of fixing Phobos so it does not depend on autodecode. He
> is, however, rightfully concerned about the extent of breakage that would
> happen if autocode were removed. So am I.

Just pulling the trigger is far too big a breaking change, and I think that
a number of us who are strongly in favor of getting rid of auto-decoding
agree with you on that. At some point, we may very well need to decide
between breaking code and permanently carrying this technical debt, but the
first thing to do is to work towards mitigating the breaking changes as much
as possible. Then at least, if we do break code, the impact is much lower.

> Interestingly, when I tried to remove autodecoding from path/file code a
> couple years ago, I received quite a bit of resistance. It seems there's
> been a tectonic shift in opinion on autodecode.

A number of us very much liked the idea at first, but part of the problem
was that a lot of us didn't understand Unicode well enough at the time. And
as we've come to better understand it, we've seen how poor a design decision
it is to auto-decode. Also, the number of questions and complaints that
we've had to field over time with regards to auto-decoding has helped
highlight how problematic it is from a usability standpoint. So, most of us
who didn't understand well enough up front have learned better.

> What I'd like to see, that we all agree on, is progress in removing
> autodecode reliance from Phobos. Let's see what it takes.

Agreed.

- Jonathan M Davis