D tooling is disappointing

[Mike Parker]

On Wednesday, 17 August 2022 at 10:45:16 UTC, tastyminerals wrote:

> This is nowhere a critic to the tons of work that WebFreak001 
> does, but rather feedback or probably an accumulated 
> disappointment with things that I believe can be easily tackled 
> with a community effort.

The problem as I see it is that we long relied on people rolling 
up their sleeves and doing the things that need to be done. That 
was a major characteristic of the D community. In that 
environment, people work on what they need or what interests 
them. That was great for several years and allowed the ecosystem 
to get off the ground, but we're long past the time where relying 
on that sort of community self-direction is viable. Something 
should have been done much sooner. But it wasn't, and here we are.

But now, yes, it's on the radar. Improving the user experience is 
a big item in the vision document. If you saw my DConf talk, I 
mentioned the plan to assemble an ecosystem management team. 
Their raison d'etre will be to establish priority projects, 
provide direction, and ensure the priority ecosystem tasks they 
lay out get seen through to the end. It will be a team of mostly 
volunteer managers overseeing volunteer contributors, so it will 
still be subject to some of the same issues that arise with any 
group of volunteers, but my hope is that it provides a clear path 
to onboarding and motivating more contributors while gradually 
improving the user experience and the overall state of the 
ecosystem.

That's still around the next bend, though. First we need to get 
some other parts of the house in order. That's what we're working 
on right now. We still aren't in a position such that things are 
moving forward as quickly and efficiently as anyone would like, 
but we are making progress and things should start picking up 
steam by the end of this year.