Quo vadis, D2? Thoughts on the D library ecosystem.

[David Nadlinger]

On 3/20/11 12:50 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 03/19/2011 06:12 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Really, the problem is that someone needs to take the initiative on
>> this. They
>> need to work on setting it up and supporting the ecosystem which would
>> result in
>> a group of such projects. Good ideas tend to be presented around here
>> and then
>> go nowhere, because no one actually takes the initiative to do them. The
>> "wouldn't this be a good idea?" tactic doesn't tend to get very far,
>> even if
>> everyone agrees, simply because someone has to put in the time and
>> effort to do
>> it, and while people may think that it's a good idea, there are only
>> so many
>> people working on Phobos and other D-related stuff, and there's a lot
>> to be done,
>> and everyone has something that they'd like to see done, and _that_ is
>> what
>> they're generally working on.
>
> Words of the wise.

I am well aware of the fact that the way from an idea or even a concrete 
proposal to its implementation can be long, particularly so in an open 
source community where you have to hope that someone steps forward and 
voluntarily invests a considerable amount of his/her spare time on it.

But still, it is just as important to get from an assorted collection of 
vague ideas to an actual decision/proposal, even more so with a problem 
like this, which isn't about hacking up some code, but about us as a 
community deciding how we want to manage ourselves to get forward 
efficiently:

As Jonathan mentioned, there already were a couple of posts on the 
newsgroup about a possible incubation area in the last months, for 
example [1] and [2], which corroborates the fact that we need to do 
something about this. However, it seems that this threads didn't even 
get from the »I wonder whether this would be a good idea« to the »It 
would be great to have this, volunteers wanted« phase.

Also, let's not forget that we already have a D-specific project hosting 
solution, DSource, yet everyone is bitching about it – I don't want to 
exclude myself here, and I think there are valid reasons for doing so.

My secret evil master plan behind starting this thread was:
  - Start a general discussion about the topic to collect existing ideas.
  - Condense the opinions into a concrete proposal and put it up for 
discussion and sorting out the details.
  - Work with a few other interested people (I hope there are some) on 
actually implement the proposal(s) and improve the current situation. ;)

I'll elaborate on my ideas of a viable incubation platform/DSource 2.0 
in another post…

David


[1] 
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Phobos_incubator_project_115387.html

[2] 
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Is_this_a_viable_effort_The_DRY_principle_community-wide_126036.html