3 months of waiting...

[Jonathan Marler]

On Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 16:26:43 UTC, berni44 wrote:
> Last week, I was quite disappointed when no one replied on my 
> anouncement of a new website about D (meanwhile there are three 
> replies, one negative, two positive, but it's somewhat too 
> late). I'm also waiting for almost three months now for a 
> review of my PRs concerning replacing sprintf (just doing 
> thumbs up isn't enough). Together this made me quite sad.
>
> So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have 
> time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, 
> that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.
>
> I kept all PRs open, because I think they are all ripe to be 
> merged (there is one, where n8sh commented in the last week and 
> his suggestions should be added), but I will neither care for 
> them anymore. Close them, use them or continue to ignore them; 
> I don't mind.
>
> Recently I was working on a complete rewrite of the 
> documentation of std.format with some improvements, bug fixes 
> and stuff. I added also unittests to verify the documentation. 
> It's still work in progress, but it's about 80% finished. Again 
> I will not continue work on this. But I uploaded it on github 
> [1]. You can use it, if you like.
>
> Bye bye
>
> [1] https://github.com/berni44/phobos/blob/formatS/std/format.d


I've had similar experience.  Waited months for someone to look 
at pull request with no response.  The leadership of the D 
community does not have enough time to review all the Pull 
Requests that come in.  There's too few people that can review, 
and too many good developers leave out of frustration or 
difference of opinion.  From what I understand, the amount of 
work to review code in dlang's repositories is relatively low, 
but the number of people that can and do review is even smaller.

Maybe the leadership needs to spend more time cultivating 
expertise among the community and delegating roles to sustain the 
influx of work that comes in? I do know that the leadership has a 
hard time finding the "right" people that can review code in a 
way that they are happy with.  I recall Andrei talking about 
this, and he mentions that when he does try to "let go" he comes 
back later to find issues with code that got approved that he 
wasn't able to review.  Of course, we can't all be as good as 
Andrei :)  It's rare to find someone with his amount of talent 
and experience.

My advice is to understand that working on the Dlang repositories 
is typically not going to be quick.  As I've come to learn this, 
I've naturally come to spend less time working on D and more time 
working on other things.  I still work on D if there are things I 
need, but in general I tend to dismiss most of my inclinations to 
work on things that I would otherwise do if I thought people 
would be there to review it. Unfortunately, there's not much you 
or I can do, it's in the hands of the leadership.  They must be 
waiting for more developers to come along that can review code, 
but it seems like the current state is deturing those very people 
sticking around.  Feels like a catch 22 situation.