Thoughts on versioning

[Paul Backus]

On Tuesday, 26 October 2021 at 14:41:38 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> I foresee the following challenges:
>
> * Evolution to future versions. Does copying the whole codebase 
> and tweaking it scale to e.g. annual releases of Phobos? Five 
> years from now we'll have essentially five copypastas. How do 
> you maintain them?

Simple: release the new version on code.dlang.org, and don't 
merge it into Phobos proper until its API is stable and it's had 
time to fully bake. No need for annual releases, no need for 
multiple rounds of copy-pasta.

As far as I can tell all past experience should tell us that 
Phobos is a bad place to develop new code, and code.dlang.org is 
a good one. Consider `sumtype`: it began development in 2018 as a 
dub package, and was merged into Phobos in 2021 after reaching 
version 1.0. Meanwhile, `std.experimental.allocator` was started 
several years *before* `sumtype` (git history goes back to 2015), 
but still has not reached a stable, finished state.