$750 Bounty: Issue 16416 - Phobos std.uni out of date (should be updated to latest Unicode standard)

[Petar]

On Monday, 4 May 2020 at 17:01:01 UTC, Robert M. Münch wrote:
> ...

I believe this is an excellent initiative, thank you for starting 
it!

Perhaps this script, along with repository that is part of can 
help those wishing to update std.uni to the latest version: 
https://github.com/DmitryOlshansky/gsoc-bench-2012/blob/master/gen_uni.d

With regard to the rate of pull requests being merged into the 
core repositories, I would say that it is highly contextually 
dependent. I strongly advise either:

a) subscribing for notifications from the core dlang repositories
    (dmd, druntime, phobos, dub, etc.) for an extended period of 
time (3 months min)
    - you'll be able to observe the group dynamics (e.g. which 
contributors have
      experience with which part of the codebase, why some things 
are merged quickly
      and others take a while, etc.)
    - this way you can really draw conclusions for yourself

(b) looking at the statistics:
   - https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pulse/monthly
   - https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pulse/monthly
   - https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pulse/monthly
   - https://github.com/dlang/dub/pulse/monthly

as opposed to drawing conclusions from single data points of 
anecdotal evidence.

 From my several years of experience, I can say the following:
- small, less complex pull requests are generally easy to get 
merged

- it depends on the part of the codebase - if you open a pull 
request for a part whose maintainers are currently active, you 
can expect a speedy review. If it's a part (e.g. std.regex) that 
is both highly complex and with a small number of maintainers, 
then it may take a while)

- teamwork and communication - since all of us are living in 
different time zones, rather than working in the same office, you 
should be prepared that communication (which is a prerequisite of 
merging) will be with high-latency.
Changes that are described well, for which the benefit is clear 
and doesn't look like they may introduce regressions are of 
course received well. Discussion prior to opening a merge request 
can help to guide the implementation in the right direction and 
save time later in the review process.

Many contributors are active on the dlang Slack [1] which makes 
it a good place to ping people for feedback, or just to have a 
near real-time conversation. In the past 1-3 years, I have 
noticed a trend that many active contributors are mostly active 
on GitHub and Slack, rather than the newsgroup. If you see that 
pull request has fallen through the cracks (no new replies from 
maintainers), don't hesitate to ping us either there or here on 
the newsgroup.

[1]: https://dlang.slack.com/