The state of string interpolation

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2018 at 03:02:02AM +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 7 December 2018 at 02:47:01 UTC, Arun Chandrasekaran wrote:
> > On one hand people talk about D community not having enough man
> > power + wanting to have a corporate back-up, etc. On the other
> > hand... :(
> 
> Yeah, D has plenty of workers. I rarely even bother trying to work
> with D's management though. My motivation was killed years ago.
> 
> I recently tried again though after the new PR manager actually pinged
> me! I fixed the PR.... and now it is sitting in silence again. Wolf,
> wolf, wolf, the boy cried.

The thing is, the manpower we lack is more in the area of reviewing and
merging PRs, not so much in coding up those PRs in the first place.  The
scope of D is huge, and covers many different areas of expertise;
reviewing PRs quite often requires expertise in a certain area in order
to do it justice, but there are only a scant few who can do the job,
usually just one person, who is also responsible for many other areas,
besides non-D-related responsibilities such as a full-time job.
Speaking as a Phobos committer, I simply don't have the expertise to
have the confidence to review many PRs that involve areas I'm not
familiar with, and my time is already too limited even in areas I *am*
confident to review.  As a result, I refrain from reviewing for fear of
making the wrong decision(s) -- or even if I do review the parts of the
PR I'm confident enough to review, I would refrain from merging unless
somebody else more competent reviews it.

Also, there's a lack of clear communication of expectations from W&A.
Some years ago, when I and a few others were actively merging PRs, at
one point Andrei stepped in and expressed unhappiness at the kind of
changes that were being merged. He had good reasons for it, and in
retrospect he did the right thing.  But OTOH he also did not give clear
enough directions as what exactly *is* desired / undesired, so, lacking
enough information to proceed, passivity set in, from the fear of
getting vetoed again.  Their general reticence on many smaller issues,
while understandable given how much is how their plate, nonetheless
forms a very bad combination with wanting everything to be perfect --
it's not always clear what their idea of "perfect" is, and when nobody
knows and W&A don't speak up, things just grind to a standstill.

The slow rate of adding new committers also does not help, given our
already lacking manpower and the general busy-ness of existing
committers. There are many more eager contributors submitting PRs than
there are committers who are trusted enough to review and merge them, so
we're bottlenecking in a bad way.

There's also too much of the perfect becoming the enemy of the good,
which seems to be a common malady in D circles, and that doesn't help
things either.

I think at some point, W&A are just going to have to loosen their rein
on things, and appoint and trust more (many more) delegates to make
decisions.  Keeping everything bottlenecking on just the two of them is
not a viable long-term strategy.  While they have acknowledged in the
past that they lack experience in management and are trying their best
with what they have, this situation has been going on for years, and the
improvements have been slow.  It's showing signs that this mode of
management isn't working very well for an open source project, and it
may be time to seriously reconsider how things are run, lest the
technical excellence of D gets dragged under by ineffective management.


T

-- 
"A one-question geek test. If you get the joke, you're a geek: Seen on a California license plate on a VW Beetle: 'FEATURE'..." -- Joshua D. Wachs - Natural Intelligence, Inc.