Some thoughts

[Laeeth isharc]

On Monday, 25 November 2019 at 20:03:27 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>
> At this point, I don't think the problem is identifying work 
> that needs to be done, but rather identifying ways to get it 
> done.
>
> You should, of course, file bug reports as appropriate, but 
> that's not enough. Sticking with cars, what we have here is 
> people seeing someone that's broke in a car with no gas by the 
> side of the road. Telling him that he needs to put gas in to 
> get going isn't going to accomplish much - he already knows 
> that's why the car died, and he knows how to fix it. The only 
> thing that will help is giving him money to buy gas, giving him 
> a container of gas, or giving him a way to earn money needed to 
> buy gas.
>
> There are many comparisons with the experience provided by Go 
> and Rust. Those languages had tremendous financial resources 
> behind them. The greatest assistance you can give to D at this 
> point is to come up with ideas to obtain more resources or 
> otherwise come up with a plan to get the problems fixed. This 
> has been discussed to death, but that doesn't accomplish 
> anything. There is nobody that's going to read about the 
> problems and start fixing them.

I think often it's less about financial resources than a 
coordination problem.

Lots of people probably wouldn't mind fixing bugs or improving 
documentation to earn some extra money and maybe some people or 
companies would be willing to support the ecosystem through 
funding but unless somebody takes it upon themselves to organise 
a way to make it happen then it won't.

It might be as simple as setting up a page where people can 
indicate their willingness to fix bugs and send email address 
along with the sort of daily rate they would need.  Then it's 
much easier to ask for support if someone will oversee that 
process.  You could allow people to channel money to bugs they 
care about provided they channel some to community bug fixing 
needs.

The difference between a bug bounty I guess is they might be a 
bit too passive for our current stage of development.

The barrier to getting Symmetry Autumn of Code started was much 
more about organisational questions than the dollar cost itself.