[phobos] We desperately need... a clear development process.

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, November 17, 2010 09:20:47 Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 3:13 AM, spir <denis.spir at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What about learning from other languages' stdlib implementation &
> > evolution? More generally, about language development process? Python is
> > an example in this domain (clear set of builtin features(*), 1 need <-->
> > 1 tool(*), transition phases, deprecation warnings, PEPs...); maybe the
> > evolution process (PEPs & 2 mailing lists) is just a bit too
> > complicated.
> 
> You can write up a DIP if you desire:
> 
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs
> 
> It is somewhat official, and a little manual, but this is the
> currently accepted way to create and document a requested change for
> discussion and revision.

Except that it's obviously pretty much never used. There a grant total of 8 DIPs 
with the first one being only an example. It may very well be that we should 
start using DIPs as a major part of Phobos development (or something similar to 
DIPs rather than DIPs, since arguably DIPs are for the language itself rather 
than the standard library - maybe PIP (Phobos Improvement Proposal) or DLIP (D 
Library Improvement Proposal)), but they obviously aren't really be used at this 
point.

I do think that it's clear though that we need to start thinking about how to 
better organize and formalize some aspects of Phobos development - especially 
once we reach the point that we want it to be relatively stable. Right now, the 
whole process is very ad hoc, which has worked so far, but as we get closer to 
serious stability and as more people work on Phobos (be it by actually being on 
the dev team with commit access or by submitting bug fixes or modules for 
possible inclusion), it's going to need to become more organized. There isn't 
much with a clear process at this point, and that's going to make making real 
progress more difficult.

One thing that really struct me with some of the posts about Go recently and its 
one year birthday was how many developers they had who had submitted to the 
project. It was _way_ more than we have, and I get the impression that they're 
progressing far faster than we are. That doesn't mean that we want to do things 
the way that they do or have as many people contributing as they do, but the 
current process can't handle that kind of participation, and we are going to 
need more participation if we want Phobos to grow and progress faster.

- Jonathan M Davis