Pull freeze

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2012 22:46:52 +0200
"David Nadlinger" <see at klickverbot.at> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 31 July 2012 at 15:54:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> wrote:
> > I thought a good thing to do is use branching for releases, and 
> > that we can start doing that without much difficulty. No?
> 
> I think doing that would be a good idea. Some people might prefer 
> fancier branching schemes, given that handling them is much more 
> painless with Git than with SVN, but this doesn't prevent us from 
> implementing release branches as a first step.
> 
> What's also important from a »million users« point of view is 
> that the origins of every release artifact is traceable, both 
> internally and for users, both in terms of source code and 
> tools/commands to prepare the archives. This also applies to beta 
> releases: Please, PLEASE let's start to properly name them 
> (dmd-2.060-beta1.zip) along with tagging the respective revisions 
> in Git and keeping the old versions around, instead of just 
> overwriting a single archive with unknown (and routinely broken) 
> contents. Otherwise things are bound to become chaotic once more 
> than us 15-ish people actually test the betas.
> 
> Which reminds me: We really need to announce the beta releases 
> more publicly, i.e. in the forums, on the website, on Twitter, 
> IRC, etc. Once a release is out, we can't take it back, but I'm 
> sure there are many enthusiastic D users who wouldn't mind 
> running their projects/test suites against the compiler once 
> before the official release if they were only asked to. It's easy 
> to forget if you are subscribed to all the mailing lists, but the 
> visibility of an upcoming release is almost zero until it is out 
> of the door. Yes, we have [dmd-beta], but it takes extra effort 
> to subscribe to it – more people are subscribed to 
> digitalmars.D.announce via the mail gateway then to the 
> low-volume beta list!
> 

+1 ALL

Along those lines, I really think dmd-beta should me moved to the
newsgroups. Granted, I am biased since I hate mailing lists. But moving
it to NG means:

- Consistency with the rest of the D traffic.
- Easier to find/discover/subscribe.
- Easier to follow the branches of discussion: Not everyone's email
  client does threading, but it's standard on NG readers.
- We get forum.dlang.org integration and the associated visibility and
  google/bing-ability basically for free.