Wannabe contributor frustrations

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 11 February 2016 at 02:07:54 UTC, Etienne wrote:
> On Wednesday, 10 February 2016 at 23:30:03 UTC, Márcio Martins 
> wrote:
>> My expectation was that given I followed the official 
>> "tutorial" closely, everything was going to just work, instead 
>> I spent about 2 hours on this and got nowhere...
>
> It took me way more than 2 hours to grasp how this build 
> process works. It wasn't until I had read through the whole 
> source code actually.

It's also a pain to edit. It's been suggested several times that 
we change the build system (e.g. to use 
https://github.com/atilaneves/reggae), but IIRC, Walter and 
Andrei have generally been opposed to the idea of changing it. 
It's one of those things that frequent contributors have more or 
less sorted out and don't usually worry about much anymore (aside 
perhaps from the rare occasions when they need to edit the 
makefiles), whereas it definitely tends to bite folks who aren't 
familiar with it. And building the documentation is that much 
worse.

Personally, I'd love to see it changed to something more 
maintainable, but we'd  have to be sure that what we were 
switching to really was better. As it is, I wrote a program that 
I use to update the source and do builds on my machine so that 
building is semi-sane, and I suspect that other contributors have 
done similar.

- Jonathan M Davis