When will D1 be finished?

[Georg Wrede]

Jason House wrote:
> Walter Bright Wrote:
> 
>> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>>> I know.  How many months has bug 314* had the most votes?  And 313
>>> while we're at it.  Importing has been broken for years and instead D2
>>> is getting thread-local variables.  It seems like a gross misdirection
>>> of effort.
>> 314 does not affect correct code, hence is an implicitly less important 
>> issue.
>>
>> The order of importance of bugs is roughly:
>>
>> 1. silently generating bad code
>> 2. compiler crashes
>> 3. regressions that break previously working code
>> 4. not accepting valid code
>> 5. accepting invalid code
>> 6. poor error messages
> 

> IMHO opponion, these should exactly match the severity categories in
> bugzilla.
> 
>> Throw into that how much work a bug is to fix, how many projects it
>>  affects, if there's a patch submitted, etc.
> 
> If open bugs were marked with a difficulty level, that may reduce the
> barrier to entry for would-be hackers of the dmd source.

Whee, that's a new take on this one, and I wholeheartedly support the 
notion!

(And, of course, an educated first-reading guess from a D guru is 
enough, nobody expects something that perfectly correlates with some 
a-posteriori notion of actual effort!)

> I've been thinking lately that D needs a "help wanted" page that
> lists broad categories for contribution and instructions on getting
> started. The list posted in the promoting D thread seemed like a
> great start.

Yes!

> I've also wondered a bit about the impression people have of Walter
> ignoring the things most important to them. Obviously, everyone can't
> talk to Walter directly. I wonder if it would be possible to have
> official delegates on specific aspects of D... People hand picked by
> Walter as expert proxies. For example, changes to std.algorithm (and
> all of Phobos?)  should go through Andrei. I have not tried to come
> up with a list of categories. Having an exhaustive set of D-related
> concerns ans officisl proxies would help focus discussion/efforts. It
> also gives a way for a the most important concerns to be raised to
> Walter directly through back channels such as coffee shop discussions
> , phone calls, e-mail etc.


Very valid points!

As a precedent, I've always wondered how Linus Torvalds (of Linxu fame) 
made the transition from about 5 guys as helpers to 1000 guys, seeming 
to have *no* problem at all, expanding in less than a few months.

I've always thought that he must've been lucky as hell, but then I 
realise that that's just lazy thinking, after the fact. The other 
explanation worries the daylights out of me: maybe he simply was a 
superior being. Meaning that, first of all, just reading Tanenbaum, he 
understood, and perceived as trivial, stuff that sent everybody else 
screaming to the woods. *And*, second, that creating, constantly 
modifying, and expanding, a hierarchy of aides, was no bigger a thing 
for him, than programming a balanced red-black tree.

Actually, we're luckier than Linus, because we've already got Andrei, 
and Don ((and a few others, apologies for not mentioning here!!!)), (in 
addition to Walter, of course), but the rest of the "forest management" 
has been, ehh, haphazard, at the most, so far.

Creating SIGs, hierarchies, work flows, compartmentalizing task groups, 
assigning responsibilities, letting go of "all threads in _my_ hands", 
distributing authority, even Specifying web page specs and arrays of 
them -- are all tasks that traditionally have *not* been the forte of 
"programming geeks" or 'auteurs'.

As we approach the day when most of the things what we'd (as D geeks) 
believe should be met (to admittedly varying degrees of success), it 
becomes increasingly important to recognize (and *admit*) the things we 
*must deal with* as the next cohort of issues.

((I can only hope that this makes sense to more than half of the readers.))