DMD needs branches

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Chris Miller wrote:
> I'm sure this was brought up in the past, but DMD definitely needs
> stable and unstable branches.

About the biggest problems.. I find it difficult to keep track of the
changes. The docs are now much better than what they were in 2003 when I
started using D, but they could be so much more.

There are some real problems in the current development model. First,
the DMD frontend is used by many entities (Mr. Bright, Mr. Friedman, Mr.
Richards and several others). Of course there are several pairs of eyes
also constantly hunting bugs from it. Many have created their own
installation scripts to update to a new release. Now, wouldn't it be
much easier to have a central repository for anyone to access? I mean,
although DMD 1.x is now out, it isn't so much more stable than the 0.1xx
beta releases. Maybe even create experimental branches so the community
could test patches with GDC before applying them to official DMD.

Another thing is documentation. DDOC generates nicely formatted pages
without much trouble. It should be possible to test embedded example
code by just compiling them. IIRC there have been bug reports about
examples that are not even syntactically correct. Another thing is the
pages don't currently contain metadata, e.g. version tags. This would
probably require some sort of server side wiki software. The Trac
project (although not best for pure documentation) is a good example of
this. It allows one to create reports about fixed bugs and then
cut'n'paste those to release announcements (possibly even automatically).

How could community help more? When I find a bug in the documentation
I'm not sure should I even report it. I mean, e.g. fixing a single
missing 'n' requires a lot of bureaucracy. First logging to bugzilla,
searching for previous reports, writing the report, someone reading it,
actually fixing it, and marking as fixed. It could all be done by a
(even novice) community member. Maybe sharing the user identification
info with dsource could help, allowing rw access to trusted members.

I want to thank Walter for creating D and the community for helping me
throughout the years. D is a wonderful language, but those bugs are
hurting big projects like Deadlock a lot. It's great to see high level
proof-of-concept stuff like BLADE gets attention. After all, that brings
the publicity. But please don't forget the real users with real world
projects.