Dconf AGM draft agenda

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Wednesday, 3 April 2019 at 11:53:11 UTC, Seb wrote:
> Thanks a lot for this!

No problem.

> It would be super nice to have handy links to the relevant GH 
> PRs, Bugzilla issue or forum discussion.

True, I'm not sure how much I'll be able to get done, I fly out 
tomorrow evening and will be pretty busy until dconf.

> Also each point should have a short description, because I 
> don't know what you want to discuss with e.g. "Stuff from 
> github.com/truedat101/dlang-sv-community".

Whoops I thought I'd fixed that.

> Anyhow, a few points:
>
>> Deprecate autodecode – plan of action
>
> tl;dr: the only way we can get rid of it is std.v2

Grumble, grumble.

>> Dub tester to regression scan for dmd releases - Neia
>
> How is this different to the existing project tester?

IIRC it was run against all dub projects, as opposed to a select 
group.

>> 64 compiler release for windows
>
> It's listed twice.

Its very important ;) (whoops)

> In short: the release setup is pretty complicated and only 
> Martin has all the VMs required for the build setup.

Hmm, that screams single point of failure to me.

> Also, you might want to add to your list that the binaries for 
> Windows are no longer signed.

Noted, thanks.

>> int[$] arr = [1,2,3,4];
>
> I wouldn't get my hopes up for this one.
> A DMD PR has been reverted and then closed.
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/3615
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/4377
>
> Since then `staticArray` has been added to Phobos:

Hmm:

>> [Andrei]: I am definitely thinking [$] should not be in D. We 
>> need to achieve most of what it does with libraries.

I don't like that reasoning: just because we can doesn't mean we 
should (unnecessary template instances). I note that the same 
reasoning seems to have been used to remove hex strings which 
have come to the end of their deprecation period.

>> changes w.r.t DIP1000, c.f. dlang.org#2453
>
> the subpoints seem unrelated.

That was the PR that took forever to get approved after _I_ 
attempted to reconcile the lack of documentation about dip1000. 
(yes I'm still annoyed)

>> Quality of documentation
>
> It's pretty bad. DMD documentation is almost unusable, for 
> druntime many modules don't have long descriptions or examples. 
> Phobos is a lot better, but the ddoc <-> ddox duplication is 
> still around.
> The tour.dlang.io should have been revisited and reworked a 
> long time ago, but no one got around (in short: we want to have 
> a more natural intro for readers and show off D features in the 
> beginning, not end).

Yup, I'm hoping that having discussed it in the morning some 
otherwise idle people might take the charge at the hackathon (man 
those CIs are going to get hammered).

>> Transition from DMC+OPTLINK to msvc/mingw + lld
>
> I have tried this before. Walter will definitely object to 
> this. Other people also gave it a shot, see e.g.
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8347
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/9085

Well he's going to have to seriously justify that position 
(modulo below).

> With mingwg + lld there is also this problem: 
> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19760

Bummer.

> At least, dub now does the sensible thing:
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dub/pull/1661

Good.

>> FreeBSD 11/12
>
> It's a mess and as almost no one uses D on FreeBSD, this 
> doesn't move forward:
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8567
>
> FWIW toolchain triplet selection would have been nice too:
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8020

Indeed.

>> State of std.experimental
>
> The entire idea of std.experimental kinda failed, because 
> breaking changes can't be SemVer-ed,
> If you're asking whether anything can be stabilized, we're far 
> from it:
>
> - stdx.logger: people want a @nogc logger (and IIRC there were 
> some API issues)
> - stdx.checkedint: it's not even @safe by default (see e.g. 
> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/6369, 
> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/5928, 
> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/6550)
> - stdx.allocator: still changes happening very often. The 
> community fork diverged and is usable with betterC 
> (https://github.com/dlang-community/stdx-allocator). There are 
> also quite a few bugzilla issues on it
> - stdx.typecons: probably the only module that could be 
> stabilized (though it only contains two functions)
>
> I'm not sure what to do with wrap as the existing wrap would 
> need to be deprecated and removed, but we could stabilize Final 
> (D's head-const):
>
> https://dlang.org/phobos/std_experimental_typecons.html#.Final
>
>> DMD as a library
>
> With stuff like https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/9507, it's a 
> constant battle :/

I know.

>> Get bugzilla under control (prioritisation)
>
> We tried quite a few things over the last years:
>
> - #dbugfix campaign
> - voting on Bugzilla issues
>
> Currently, we're back to people complaining loudly on the NG 
> about very important issues as this is the only way to grab 
> attention.

Even a list of bounties would be useful.