new DIP41: dmd/rdmd command line overhaul.

[Dicebot]

On Wednesday, 22 May 2013 at 13:38:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> At a level it should be obvious that not all breakages are 
> equal. It's better to suffer from few and well-motivated 
> breakages that actually fix real problems and improve user 
> code, than from arbitrary breakages caused by name churn. To 
> just put them under the same umbrella "this release broke my 
> build" would miss important details.

This is _exactly_ the mindset I am trying to fight with. I have 
had an unpleasant experience of working in typical enterprise 
environment for few years and there is quite a strong attitude 
about this - no one cares about reasons for code breakage. For 
those who care about breakage, it is a boolean flag - either 
breaks, or not.

Contrary to this, there are plenty of people ( I am sure you know 
lot of them at least from this newsgroup ;) ) who can accept any 
breaking change for a greater good if reasonable tool to deal 
with it is provided.

I don't believe it is the case where you can both eat the cookie 
and have it.

> Of course it is a problem. There have been numerous discussions 
> on the topic indeed, and we are evidently trying to improve 
> things.

I don't see those evidences. That is the issue. We keep speaking 
on newsgroup about how important stability is, keep rejecting 
proposal because of this and keep releasing dmd that breaks 
stuff. The very next one will do it again - we both were 
participating in that mail list thread after all.

There are some good improvements in details (like "-transition" 
switch Kenji has implemented), but overall attitude does not seem 
to change.

> I only count one discussion initiated by you ("Release process 
> and backwards compatibility" started on March 8, 2013 at 
> http://forum.dlang.org/thread/nchvayzsbrzevvucmmmi@forum.dlang.org. 
> That discussion has had some 15 responses from 7 people, none 
> of whom seemed to quite rally behind your point. I am sorry you 
> feel that particular idea has not received the attention you 
> believe it deserves, but it would be much to accuse me or 
> Walter of deliberately ignoring it.

I am very sorry if it sounds offensively, but not leaving a 
single comment in a thread that essentially is created to ask 
language authors their opinion about development/release process 
is quite the same as ignoring. If you wanted more opinions about 
it, you could have just mentioned it. No one can make this call 
but you.