D versionning

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, July 15, 2012 14:58:14 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/12/2012 3:40 PM, Patrick Stewart wrote:
> > Most ridiculous thing about D is that it breaks so much backward
> > compatibility that people just give up using it. Decent versioning like
> > this might help people stick to something.
> > 
> > Wake up, guys, it is 10+ years and *still* it haven't reached some form of
> > stable release.
> > 
> > Like I sad, engineering failure.
> 
> We did do a stable release, D1, and there were plenty of complaints that D1
> did not get new features.

Well, if we were to move to a model where we had 2.x.y, we only put new 
features on changes to x, and bug fixes when in changes to y, and we did x 
releases every few months and y releases monthly (or something along those 
lines), then people would theoretically get a more stable release to work off 
of with the new features still coming semi-frequently. You get a better 
balance between stability and new stuff than we've had. And I think that in the 
long run, that's probably what we should do. Instead, what we've had is either 
stability without any new features or at all or a new features but a lack of 
stabliity.

The problem is that we're still ironing out too much, and most of the breakage 
relates to bug fixes, not new features. I think that we need to reach the point 
where D is more or less at where TDPL says it should be before we go to a 
model we're splitting out the new stuff from the bug fixes. In theory, the only 
new stuff that we're doing right now relates to matching TDPL and ironing out 
issues with existing stuff rather than outright adding new features anyway 
(though some outright new stuff _has_ been added - e.g. the new lambda syntax). 
So, in that sense, pretty much everything is supposed to be bug fixing right 
now.

- Jonathan M Davis