new DIP41: dmd/rdmd command line overhaul.

[Mr. Anonymous]

On Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 09:29:22 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 09:26:31 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 5/23/2013 2:01 AM, Dicebot wrote:
>>> See current beta mailing list for several
>>> examples of what should have never happened in real stable 
>>> development process.
>>
>> The reason it is a beta is so we can identify problems and 
>> deal with them before a release.
>
> In perfect world beta exists to identify problems _unknown_ 
> before. Almost all issues I have seen mentioned so far was 
> known by developers (those were bug fixes after all) but 
> considered acceptable to put into compiler anyway. And that is 
> a problem.

I don't think it's possible for a language to both evolve and 
keep being stable. At least not with the current release process, 
with a single branch.

There should at least be 2 branches - stable (as in binary stable 
- 0% code breakage), and experimental/beta/you name it, which 
breaks code when reasonable.
Then, after some amount of time, this experimental branch becomes 
the new stable branch (while the previous is still available for 
download).

I think the "Development and Release Process" wiki page proposes 
exactly that.
http://wiki.dlang.org/Release_Process