DUB - call to arms

[Seb]

Hi all,

The problem
-----------

I think this is well-known, but I still highly encourage you all 
to have a look at this thread:

https://forum.dlang.org/thread/eftttpylxanvxjhoigqu@forum.dlang.org?page=1

or the issue tracker:

https://github.com/dlang/dub/issues

tl;dr: the status quo of dub is really really terrible:

- tons of issues (often unanswered)
- __critical__ piece of infrastructure
- less than a PR per month

I had to use Cargo the other day and compiling 80 (!) 
dependencies was a
miracle (parallel fetching and builds).

We want the D ecosystem to grow and flourish and I don't think I 
have to
stress how important a good package manager is for this.

What can we do?
---------------

We have about $6k in our OpenCollective budget [1] (there's still 
the
$3k that we owe WebFreak) which means we have about $3k left.
I propose to use this as a starting base to fund serious work
on Dub (see the forum thread for a few ideas).

I believe that with the D community pitching in and a few 
companies
(they complain about dub too), we could get about $10k for this 
effort.

Now, of course, the question is what can we do to improve Dub's 
status quo?

It would be amazing if we could hire Martin or Sönke (even if 
it's only
part-time), but unfortunately as far as I am aware that's not an 
option
as both are pretty busy these days.

[1] https://opencollective.com/dlang/

Proposed actionable
-------------------

Hence, here's my proposal:

Publish a blog post analog to this "Calls to arms for Dub". The 
post could

- summarize the reasons why funding dub is so crucial
- what the biggest problems of dub are (i.e. the issues that we 
would
target first)
- announce that we start a new funding round (with $3k already 
seeded
from OC)
- maybe some companies are willing to pitch in too (e.g. 
Symmetry, Funkwerk, Sociomantic, ...)
- put out a call open for anyone to apply for this project

The exact details on payment and expectations would need to be 
specified, but I guess we should be able to fund roughly three 
months of work. OTOH we can leave these details open to the 
applicants as students might be willing to work for $10k for 
three months, but experienced software engineers might not. Also, 
some people probably could only afford to work part-time on these 
which imho would be fine too.

@community:

1) Would this be sth. you would consider applying in general? If 
not what could we do to improve this?
2) Would this be sth. you would consider donating to?


For completeness, my personal favorite items for this would be 
sth. like:

- parallel dependency downloads and builds (dub could and should 
be a lot faster)
- option to emit only include flags (for good integration in 
other tools)
- "dub install"
- dub watch (there's a PR that needs to be revived - 
https://github.com/dlang/dub/pull/446)
- colored error messages (there's already a PR that just needs to 
be revived - https://github.com/dlang/dub/pull/1490)
- cached dub registry index

Though I think if we crowd-fund this campaign, we should make a 
list of the top 20-30 issues and then let everyone vote on them.