[Dlang-internal] The Phantom Zone

[Martin Nowak]

On Tuesday, 16 January 2018 at 11:13:35 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/15/2018 8:41 PM, Brad Roberts wrote:
>> What I'd like to see as a first step is to draw a line in the 
>> sand, every new pull request as of 1/1/2018 should be handled 
>> to resolution, period.  Don't let them get stale.
>
> We've tried that again and again. It presupposes that all PRs 
> have a resolution. They do not - I mentioned 4 common reasons 
> why in the opening post.
>
> There is another problem here. I just got back from POPL 2018 
> with a list of ideas I want to get going on. I have made zero 
> progress on any of them, because I spend all the time reviewing 
> other peoples' work, dealing with can you please look at these 
> bug reports

We all know this by heart. This is counter-productive to the 
extend of questioning GitHub as development model. Don't get me 
wrong, contributions are great, and we received an amazing amount 
of talented work this way.

It becomes problematic though when it prevents us from setting an 
agenda and follow that through. Focus is the most precious 
resource we have, but contributions tend to come as random 
streams of particular interests.

What works for me, is to batch issues and work on one and only 
one domain at a time for a prolonged period (~2 weeks). Working 2 
weeks only on PRs, but then having 4 or 6 full weeks for planned 
work would be a useful approach.
For this to work we need to align better, so that most of the 
time we have someone working on PRs.

Another barrier with this approach, our current review pipe is so 
clogged that it's hard to sustain pace during a focused effort. 
To overcome this we also need to plan for review time alongside 
focused work. For example I already know that my planned work on 
limited lifetimes will need a lot of feedback from you, and that 
I'll roughly start to work on it early February. Likewise I gave 
Sönke a heads-up to soon expect plenty of dub and dub-registry 
pulls.
Just join us on dlang.slack.com, it's a very undisturbing way for 
an informal notice.

To address the backlog we prolly should prioritize every PR that 
cannot be reviewed within a minute.
This is actually rather simple work once you start to batch it. I 
went through dlang-bot's bug tracker yesterday, took less than an 
hour to prioritize https://github.com/dlang-bots/dlang-bot/issues 
(on topic https://github.com/dlang-bots/dlang-bot/issues/47).

And lastly a reminder that we should give early approvals when 
there are only nits and clearly request specific changes or close 
PRs with fundamental design issues.
There is nothing worse than getting a bit of review, only to get 
the rest of it once you come back with the requested changes.