Coming Soon: Stable D Releases!

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 7/16/12 3:51 AM, Adam Wilson wrote:
> As a result of the D Versioning thread, we have decided to create a new
> organization on Github called dlang-stable. This organization will be
> responsible for maintaining stable releases of DMD, DRuntime, and Phobos.
[snip]
> Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy D's new Stable releases!

This is a wonderful initiative that I hope will catch on.

Walter and I are fully behind this experiment. We will make/accept 
changes to the download pages to take into account this new branch.

The main threat I see is bugfixes that depend on code previously 
introduced with now features. I'm not sure how frequent that situation is.

Finally, one suggestion: I suggest you relentlessly work to automate the 
process to the point where you issue e.g. the command

./merge 534d44c979 70dcb958ea

and the script merges in the two specified commits, builds everything, 
runs the test suite, runs the Phobos unittests, and if all worked, 
builds packages and uploads them making them available right away.

That way the team members (busy professionals with many other 
responsibilities) know that once the collective decision to merge a 
commit has been taken, there's virtually no overhead to deploying the 
decision.

I'm a huge fan of automation and I believe we've made progress 
introducing it in dmd's process, but not as much as we could and should.


Good luck!

Andrei