Ghosting a language feature

[Avrina]

On Tuesday, 22 September 2020 at 14:23:51 UTC, Avrina wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 September 2020 at 04:38:37 UTC, Walter Bright 
> wrote:
>> On 9/21/2020 6:08 PM, Mike Parker wrote:> D 2.094 is a
>>> And if I want to upgrade from 2.094 to 2.095, but the new 
>>> version introduces a regression that blocks me, that 
>>> regression might not be fixed until 2.098. Now in order to 
>>> upgrade I need to deal with the changes and possible 
>>> regressions in multiple milestone realeases because there's 
>>> no long-term patch support for 2.095.
>>
>> I agree that no long-term patch support is a problem. But it's 
>> mainly the result of our team being small, not having a 
>> different release scheme. There's nothing really preventing a 
>> regression fix from going back into any particular release 
>> except someone actually doing it.
>
> This sounds like an excuse. There are smaller languages with 
> smaller teams that have better backwards compatibility and 
> support for it than D does.
>
>
>> Needing patch support for various versions could be an ideal 
>> thing that companies that need it can supply funding for.
>
> How would extra funds help? There's more than one way to solve 
> a problem. One such solution would be changing the release 
> scheme.
>
> For example, if a patch needs to be backported for the last 2 
> years. You'd have to backport that patch to 12 different 
> versions of DMD. If only 2 major releases of DMD were released 
> a year that would drop by 66% to 4. Backporting a patch to 4 
> versions is significantly easier and requires less work (and 
> funding :D) to actually do.
>
> So the release scheme definitely has an impact. If there's a 
> major spec release every 2 years, a patch would only have to be 
> backported to 2 versions to support the last 4 years. Where as 
> how many versions would you have to backport to to support the 
> same amount of time? 20? 30? Who's going to do that? That's a 
> waste of time because of the versioning scheme being used.

To add on to that, every version a patch is backported to has 
potential to cause it's own bugs and regressions. So if you have 
20 or more versions you'd have to support for a period of 4 
years, that's just not feasible, regardless of manpower or 
funding.