The Problem With DIPs

[Jack Stouffer via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 19:52:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> If you want to take charge of writing such a specification DIP, 
> please do so.

There's a reason why people resort to talking in the forms rather 
than write a DIP. It's quite obvious when you take a look at this 
page: https://wiki.dlang.org/DIP82

When it says "draft", what it actually means is "waiting for 
comments, approval, or rejection". 63 out of 88 DIPs are sitting 
in limbo because no one with authority ever made a decision on 
them. Which means a lousy 28% of DIPs are either definitively 
closed or accepted.

Take for example DIP 82: https://wiki.dlang.org/DIP82. Jonathan 
obviously spent some time on this, and it addresses an actual 
problem he's had with std.datetime. It's was written and proposed 
on the forum: 
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/ozvzscpmbixskarsgruw@forum.dlang.org

Not a single person with the authority to make a decision even 
commented on the thread. Why would anyone invest the time it 
takes to write a DIP when it will be forgotten?

How to fix this:

You have several options,

* Make a rule that either auto rejects or auto approves a DIP if 
there's no activity/argumentation on it for a specific period of 
time. This is much better than leaving things in limbo and would 
force people to take action
* Move the DIPs to a more visible area like Github (a la Swift) 
and nominate someone to manage them
* If no one has time to review/manage these, than admit it, get 
rid of the DIP process, and move all big feature requests to the 
forums