Broken?

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 17:47:56 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> What D needs at this point is a dictator. There are about 30 
> pages of discussion about Walter's std.array.front post, and 
> Steve S's counter post.
>
> It reminds me of the way it was maybe 4 years ago, when there 
> was so much bickering that I just gave up for some time, and 
> went away. Who is going to go through all that stuff, and 
> winnow a compromise out of it. Everyone has a job, or some 
> vital preoccupation with their own project.
>
> The buck has to stop somewhere - is it Walter, or Andrei, or 
> can any proposal or comment be stalled by sheer weight of 
> contrary views?
>
> This is probably a management issue, not a technical one. 
> Trouble is there's no manager, and even if their was, he'd have 
> no minions.
>
> What to do?
>
> Steve

I like it. :) It's Walter's project and he solicited opinions.  
Maybe they change his mind, maybe they don't.  In this case, it 
appears they did: he seems to have decided that the breakage 
wouldn't be worth the speedup.  What would you prefer, that 
Walter The Dictator did it anyway?  That's not how communities 
work.

There is no doubt that the buck stops with the core team.  If 
people don't like their decisions, they can and will leave or who 
knows, fork.  If you want someone willing to go against the 
grain, I have seen others here accuse Walter of being stubborn in 
the past.  I don't think you can say he simply goes with the 
crowd. ;)

I will agree with you on one point though.  It's not particularly 
clear to an outsider what the decision-making process is with D, 
ie what the deliberative process is and who ultimately decides.  
If you've been around long enough and check the github pull 
requests and commits, you can get a sense of it, but the roles 
are not really defined.  I understand most open-source projects 
work this way, but D is probably big enough now that some 
exposition is helpful.

I think it'd be nice to have a page on dlang.org, whether on the 
main site or the wiki, that laid out who the core team is, sort 
of like a masthead in a magazine, with a paragraph or two about 
each person.  This would give newcomers some bearings on who the 
core team is, what their roles are, and what they do for the 
project.  I'm sure anyone could figure all this out on their own 
eventually, with enough time spent on the newsgroup and looking 
at source commits, but the idea is to save them some time.  Just 
my suggestion.