Andrei's Google Talk

[Walter Bright]

retard wrote:
> I understood that all the contributors are waiting for the decision of a 
> single person.

Not true, that only applies to the compiler. Phobos is managed by several people 
who have commit privileges.

> Walter needs to review all compiler patches,

Yes, because I need to keep a handle on exactly how the compiler works. If I 
lose track of it, it can become a mess of things like "this seems to work" with 
little understanding. I want to especially thank Don Clugston for his invaluable 
help in reviewing submitted compiler patches, testing them, fixing a lot of the 
hard problems, and making it easy for me.


> he needs to 
> review all patches to the spec, he needs to defend D on reddit, 
> newsgroups, and all other forums.

More like I want to. Anyone else is welcome to help out here. I am hardly in a 
position to stop anyone from helping there <g>.

> He handles the whole release process.

That actually is about to change.

> He doesn't tell anything about future directions so nobody knows about 
> them.

What's unclear about it?

> The management model doesn't scale when you get more and more 
> contributors. At some point Walter won't have enough time to review all 
> contributions even if it didn't do anything else.

You're right, I can't review them all. In particular, I am fairly uninvolved in 
the development of Phobos, other than popping up now and then to complain about 
something :-)

> For example now that he is focusing on 64-bit support, all discussion 
> about rewriting the spec, fixing bugs, improving the other parts of the 
> toolchain, or developing the language further (D 2.1 or 3.0) has stalled. 

This is nonsense, as I'm not stopping anyone from helping out with any of that. 
In fact, tomorrow I have a lunch date with a fellow who is working on a D debugger.

As another example of many who have stepped up with invaluable help, Shin 
Fujishiro did the pioneering work to get D2 working on FreeBSD.

> Many people have asked bearophile to stop discussing new language 
> features because it takes away too much valuable time from Walter. 
> Something is wrong here.

I haven't asked bearophile or anyone else to stop discussing new language 
features. Anyone is free on this n.g. to ask whatever they want of others, and 
everyone is free to accede to or ignore those requests.

Here's an incomplete list of people who are in charge of various aspects of D:

Me: compiler
Sean: druntime
Brad Roberts: bugzilla, mailing lists, D test suite
Brad Anderson: D source code repository
Jan Knepper: site hosting
Several people: Phobos (generally under Andrei's leadership)
Helmut Leitner: D wiki
Andrei: build master (coming soon!)

Of course, LDC, GDC, Tango, Dil, and all the other libraries and tools, etc., 
are all led by their various self-selected groups, not me.