What do you want to see for a mature DLang?

Seb seb at wilzba.ch
Sun Dec 31 11:27:41 UTC 2017


On Sunday, 31 December 2017 at 09:37:35 UTC, Meta wrote:
> 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 outdated PRs and either guiding PRs that need work to get to a 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.

Yes, Dlang-bot was able to detect stalled issues for a while, but 
we didn't turn this on for all repositories. I have just enabled 
it:

https://github.com/dlang-bots/dlang-bot/pull/153

For the moment, it is just labelling issues with e.g. "needs 
work", "needs rebase", "stalled", "stalled-stable".
In a next stage it will start to actively ping people or close 
PRs.
Also automatically rebasing PRs if there are no conflicts is on 
the radar (the GitHub UI is quite conservative in this regard).


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