What do you want to see for a mature DLang?

Meta jared771 at gmail.com
Sun Dec 31 09:37:35 UTC 2017


On Saturday, 30 December 2017 at 14:42:45 UTC, Muld wrote:
> On Saturday, 30 December 2017 at 06:55:13 UTC, Walter Bright 
> wrote:
>> It's not like we have a shortage of bugzilla issues and are 
>> wondering what to do next.
>
> Yah there are a ton of Bugzilla issues, that's the problem. 
> More than half of them aren't "actionable" as you put it.
>
> Here's the problem, look at something like Rust:
>
> Pull requests? 95 open, it's about the same as Dlang, But if 
> you go to the last page...
>
> https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pulls?page=4&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen
>
> Look at that the oldest one is from October 15th, 20_17_.
>
> Now we go to DMD...
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pulls?page=6&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen
>
> Oldest one is from January 17, 20_13_.

This is a problem that many of us are working on fixing. The main 
reason many of these old zombie PRs stick around is that 
historically, people are hesitant to close things (for a variety 
of social reasons, I feel). While there is still the slightest 
chance that something might someday be merged, it is kept open. 
Rust is a lot more aggressive about closing bad or outdated PRs 
and either guiding PRs that need work to get to a mergeable 
state, or closing them and communicating that this is not the 
correct way to go. I watched a talk by a Rust contributor 
specifically on this point awhile ago - they have a bot that does 
a lot of the PR closure work to get around the fact that people 
are hesitant to be the "bad guy" and tell someone that their work 
is not good enough. D needs to get much better at this, and I 
think things are happening - slowly. The bad optics and 
demoralizing effect of letting things sit forever without 
definitive action outweighs the potential loss from being more 
aggressive about closing or merging.


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