What is the FreeBSD situation?

[codephantom]

On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 22:25:48 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> I've been asked why I have reduced my presence in this forum - 
> and politely told it's being missed :o) - and the simple answer 
> is I've noticed the forum discussions produce few results 
> outside the forum. I'm still looking for the perfect formula 
> that combines good forum engagement with palpable work.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei

Well.. all I can say..is be careful.

If you make this forum like the FreeBSD forums, then people will 
stop engaging, and there goes your community....(i.e go off topic 
in those forums and see what happens to you).

Disussions lead to discusions..lead to discussions...that's 
normal human behaviour.

Unexpected (OT) results can be useful for the D community too...

Perhaps some way to mark our thread as OT would be good. Then one 
could filter out OT discussion. But any attempt to stop OT 
discussion will come back and bite the community I believe. 
Humans' like discussing things too.

This thread did lead to some unintended outcomes, like me finding 
that gdc will compile code that dmd and ldc will not - 
apparentaly a bug in gdc, but a bug that I actually like. It lead 
(I hope) to a greater understanding of the importance of FreeBSD 
and the need for D to pro-actively support it (remember FreeBSD 
really is the only mature open source alternative to gpl Linux - 
but it gets treated as a second class citizen by far too many 
(e.g. the latested LDC release anouncement provides binaries for 
all platforms except FreeBSD??).

And most importantly, OT discussion in this thread may lead to a 
DMD for DOS! Now tell me that wasn't worth some OT discussion ;-)