State of the release process

[Dennis]

On Monday, 12 January 2026 at 21:24:23 UTC, M. M. wrote:
> It's great that you do all this, Dennis, despite you feeling
> not qualified. Would it make sense to get a help from someone
> like "Symmetry of Code"-intern to set-up a new build
> infrastructure?

Razvan suggested this as a Google Summer of Code project 
actually. The problem was that from experience, contestants 
usually have a familiarity with algorithms and popular 
technologies, but not so much the D ecosystem. So it's better to 
have projects that exploit that, letting contestants to build 
something they're familiar with and excited about, but in the 
context of D.

Cleaning up the release process on the other hand requires 
intimate knowledge of all corners of D (dmd, phobos, dub, tools, 
dlang.org, CI, behind the scenes servers maintained by various D 
community members) so it would be very hard to work on without a 
lot of guidance.

That being said, there are several smaller tasks that could 
easily be worked on independently. For example, I don't see why 
we need a [home grown 
concoction](https://github.com/dlang/downloads.dlang.org/blob/master/src/gen_index.d) to generate and index page of some directories on a server. There's gotta be a simpler off-the-shelf solution for that.

But creating a project, reviewing applications and mentoring also 
take a lot of energy, which could also be spent on tackling the 
problem directly. So it still wouldn't make the burden lighter 
unfortunately. But the good news is, with the new GitHub actions 
workflow going, at least building releases can be done by anyone 
with the right permissions in 1 button click, and it finishes in 
15 minutes. This is a HUGE improvement over the extremely fragile 
and slow Vagrant box setup.