DMD VS2017 Support

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 at 21:08:02 UTC, Jolly James wrote:
> I mean, if for any circumstance, e.g. like the VS2017 thing 
> (which did not suddenly appear from one day to another anyway), 
> the whole software cannot be used without larger fiddling (in 
> this case: setting up NSIS + plugins), it seems quite strange 
> to not simply update the installer, which would be a work for a 
> few minutes - and after that everybody would be happy.
> But to be honest, I don't think that this is a problem of D. 
> More or less, this is something that appears everywhere in the 
> world of open-source. Here it annoys and chases away users, in 
> the corporate sector you could not do so, as this would cause 
> the company's ruin.

D's implementation (which is a part of the project as a whole) is 
cross-platform, we support several platforms other than Windows. 
Additionally, Visual Studio integration is an optional feature of 
the Windows version, and of course VS2017 is just one supported 
version of VS. The scope of the problem may seem larger to you 
because you are affected by it personally, however at any point 
in time there may be any number of fixes queued for release of 
similar relative importance. Making an urgent release for every 
such occurrence would be impractical, if not impossible given the 
necessary work involved with making each new release.

The difference between open-source and proprietary projects here 
is mainly that open-source projects do their development in the 
open. Generally, users usually are not made aware of the status 
of any particular fix or issue for proprietary projects up until 
the point that they appear in the changelog of a published 
release. Heck, most proprietary projects don't even have public 
bug trackers, or even forums for that matter.