D has become unbearable and it needs to stop

[Iain Buclaw]

On Thursday, 8 June 2023 at 21:11:24 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew 
Cattermole wrote:
> On 09/06/2023 7:43 AM, Hipreme wrote:
>> The thing is that D doesn't have structure enough to get a LTS.
>
> Not true.
>
> Iain maintained the LTS version for gdc for a very long time.
>
> We can do it, but as far as I'm concerned its up to him if we 
> proceed and how.

GCC is released yearly with a D front-end frozen at whatever the 
current version is at the time of branching, and that stays 
maintained for ~3 years.

- GDC 11.x - D v2.076.x (C++ port)
Current release 11.4, last point release 11.5 expected 2024-05.

- GDC 12.x - D v2.100.x
Current release 12.3, next point releases expected 2024-05 and 
2025-05.

- GDC 13.x - D v2.103.x
Current release 13.1, next point releases expected 2023-08, 
2024-05, 2025-05, 2026-05.


The devs working on LDC could sync up and maintain these specific 
versions as well.  Then we'd just be working together on 
backporting regression fixes long after DMD has moved on to the 
next bi-monthly major release rather than just leave it to one 
person. ;-)

It's only a matter of creating a release branch instead of tags 
in the dlang/dmd repository so that there's still a common 
upstream maintained by all interested downstream parties - i.e: 
this is where all updates and fixes for the C++ port got landed 
to.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/tree/dmd-cxx

If no one else is doing it, there's really no incentive for me to 
re-upstream any regression fixes backported into GDC from a newer 
D language version.