[phobos] Community shout-out?

[Jonathan M Davis]

We have several modules in Phobos which are supposedly going to be deprecated in 
favor of better implementations (std.stream, std.xml, std.json, etc). As I 
understand it, this is primarily because the code isn't being maintained, is 
poorly designed for D2 (possibly because it isn't range-centric or just hasn't 
been updated with D2-only features), and/or lacks a maintainer/champion. In 
addition to that, there's various types of functionality which should probably 
be in Phobos but haven't been done yet.

The Phobos developers only have so much time on their hands, and some portion of 
this kind of work is going to need to be done by people who are not currently on 
the Phobos team. That, and we seem to be adopting the idea that the ideal 
situation is for each module to have a "champion" of sorts who is behind the 
module, working to fix bugs on it and make it better.

So, I was wondering if what we should do is figure out what some of the modules 
are that we want in Phobos - and in particular the ones currently in Phobos 
which need to be overhauled - and then post on the main D list looking for 
people willing to take them on. We don't want to a flood of code that needs to be 
reviewed for inclusion in Phobos, but if we want to get a lot of this stuff done, 
we need more people working on it - particularly people who are really looking 
to focus on it and champion it.

So, I'm suggesting that we identify the top priority module which aren't likely 
to be done by Phobos developers any time soon and see if we can get others in 
the D community to do them. In particular, it's a problem that we have several 
modules which we intend to replace. The longer that we wait, the more code that 
will be written using the old modules, and the more code which will break when 
they get replaced.

- Jonathan M Davis