Last week, I was quite disappointed when no one replied on my anouncement of a new website about D (meanwhile there are three replies, one negative, two positive, but it's somewhat too late). I'm also waiting for almost three months now for a review of my PRs concerning replacing sprintf (just doing thumbs up isn't enough). Together this made me quite sad.

So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.

I kept all PRs open, because I think they are all ripe to be merged (there is one, where n8sh commented in the last week and his suggestions should be added), but I will neither care for them anymore. Close them, use them or continue to ignore them; I don't mind.

Recently I was working on a complete rewrite of the documentation of std.format with some improvements, bug fixes and stuff. I added also unittests to verify the documentation. It's still work in progress, but it's about 80% finished. Again I will not continue work on this. But I uploaded it on github [1]. You can use it, if you like.

Bye bye

[1] https://github.com/berni44/phobos/blob/formatS/std/format.d

On Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 16:26:43 UTC, berni44 wrote:
> ...
> Bye bye

Well that's sad! For such a small community and in need for developers, losing one so active is not good.

I think the Top heads of the community should care more about this.

3 months without any answer is something very frustrating indeed.

I hope you find a place that recognize you better.

Good luck,

Matheus.

On 2/6/20 11:26 AM, berni44 wrote:
> Last week, I was quite disappointed when no one replied on my anouncement of a new website about D (meanwhile there are three replies, one negative, two positive, but it's somewhat too late).

Many here don't speak German, and while it's cool that there's a new website that I can't really read (honestly didn't even click on it), you did not exactly solicit feedback on the announcement. Is there no activity there?

> I'm also waiting for almost three months now for a review of my PRs concerning replacing sprintf (just doing thumbs up isn't enough). Together this made me quite sad.

I've seen the PR and that stuff is way out of my league. So while I've looked at quite a few of your PRs (and merged some I think) and I was very glad to have you in there fixing stuff, I think it's a bit much to expect something so technically complex that few understand to receive a thorough review by everyone. There's a reason we use sprintf for floats -- it's a hard problem. I hope it's valid and gets merged at some point, but I really can't help except give a thumbs up.

> So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.

That's too bad, I think your advent of bug fixes was an awesome initiative. One thing that is true about open source volunteer work, it's mostly thankless, and generally there are not enough people to work on it as it is. Sometimes good and productive people find that incompatible with their requirements, but I don't know how we could possibly fix that.

> I kept all PRs open, because I think they are all ripe to be merged (there is one, where n8sh commented in the last week and his suggestions should be added), but I will neither care for them anymore. Close them, use them or continue to ignore them; I don't mind.

Thank you for leaving them open!

> Recently I was working on a complete rewrite of the documentation of std.format with some improvements, bug fixes and stuff. I added also unittests to verify the documentation. It's still work in progress, but it's about 80% finished. Again I will not continue work on this. But I uploaded it on github [1]. You can use it, if you like.

Thanks for your time and effort.

-Steve

On 07/02/2020 5:50 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> 
>> I'm also waiting for almost three months now for a review of my PRs concerning replacing sprintf (just doing thumbs up isn't enough). Together this made me quite sad.
> 
> I've seen the PR and that stuff is way out of my league. So while I've looked at quite a few of your PRs (and merged some I think) and I was very glad to have you in there fixing stuff, I think it's a bit much to expect something so technically complex that few understand to receive a thorough review by everyone. There's a reason we use sprintf for floats -- it's a hard problem. I hope it's valid and gets merged at some point, but I really can't help except give a thumbs up.

I looked into float to string handling (yay formattedWrite and friends not working at CT) a couple of weeks ago.

Yeahhhh no way I am reviewing anything in that line of work beyond a thumbs up. Not that it would weigh much into getting it pulled unfortunately.

It is appreciated of course, but I can't help beyond that.

On Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 16:26:43 UTC, berni44 wrote:
> Last week, I was quite disappointed when no one replied on my anouncement of a new website about D (meanwhile there are three replies, one negative, two positive, but it's somewhat too late). I'm also waiting for almost three months now for a review of my PRs concerning replacing sprintf (just doing thumbs up isn't enough). Together this made me quite sad.
>
> So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.
>
> I kept all PRs open, because I think they are all ripe to be merged (there is one, where n8sh commented in the last week and his suggestions should be added), but I will neither care for them anymore. Close them, use them or continue to ignore them; I don't mind.
>
> Recently I was working on a complete rewrite of the documentation of std.format with some improvements, bug fixes and stuff. I added also unittests to verify the documentation. It's still work in progress, but it's about 80% finished. Again I will not continue work on this. But I uploaded it on github [1]. You can use it, if you like.
>
> Bye bye
>
> [1] https://github.com/berni44/phobos/blob/formatS/std/format.d

Really sad to hear this. It was quite fascinating to see how much you achieved in such small amount of time. Thanks for your work.
I planned to add a link to your site on my site (http://d-land.sepany.de/) but at the moment it is almost possible to find some time to do D in my spare time except reading the forum and write some posts from time to time.
I assume it is the same situation for many others in the community. It is really a time problem to do D activities beside the regular job and family activities.

I really hope you get back to D in the future.

Kind regards
Andre

On Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 16:50:32 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On 2/6/20 11:26 AM, berni44 wrote:
> [...]
> 
>> So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.
>
> That's too bad, I think your advent of bug fixes was an awesome initiative. One thing that is true about open source volunteer work, it's mostly thankless, and generally there are not enough people to work on it as it is. Sometimes good and productive people find that incompatible with their requirements, but I don't know how we could possibly fix that.

This is what's key here, imo. It can be very frustrating to have PRs or
even issues open for months or years. If you have more maintainers,
there's a higher probability at least one of them cares personally
about getting your issue or PR closed. But finding knowledgeable
maintainers is hard, because that's mostly a thankless job too. So I
don't think there's an easy fix either.

Something that might be valuable would be to actively encourage user
involvement by voting on issues and PRs. This gets us strength in
numbers and the social reward can be motivating for maintainers and
contributors. This will become easier once the issue tracker for the
core repos is moved over to GitHub[1].

Also, while the core issue here may not have an obvious solution, we
should make sure we don't worsen it by arbitrarily closing old/'stale'
issues or PRs. Some open-source projects have recently fallen into this
trap, e.g. by using a GitHub bot to automatically close old issues
and/or PRs, which is confusing for users and discouraging for
contributors.

[1] https://github.com/dlang/projects/issues/43

On Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 04:26:43PM +0000, berni44 via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> Finally I came to the conclusion, that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.
[...]

I am very sad to hear this.  You have been an extremely valuable contributor over the past so many months, fixing many things that have been neglected for a long time, and generally improving the quality of things.  Honestly, if it were up to me, I'd add you to the Phobos team. We need more active contributors like you to keep things from stagnating.  But alas, it's not my decision to make.

In any case, I hope that one day you will decide to come back.


T

-- 
I am not young enough to know everything. -- Oscar Wilde

On Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 16:26:43 UTC, berni44 wrote:
> Last week, I was quite disappointed when no one replied on my anouncement of a new website about D (meanwhile there are three replies, one negative, two positive, but it's somewhat too late). I'm also waiting for almost three months now for a review of my PRs concerning replacing sprintf (just doing thumbs up isn't enough). Together this made me quite sad.
>
> So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.

Sorry to see you go.

For what it's worth, you're far from alone in these experiences, so I don't think they're necessarily a sign of "not fitting in." It is, unfortunately, not unusual for a thread in the Announcements forum to receive few or even zero replies, or for a PR to sit unreviewed in the queue for months at a time. Engaging with the contribution process in a healthy way that avoids burnout while still achieving your goals is not easy, and I can't blame anyone who, having tried it, decides to seek greener pastures elsewhere.

If you ever do decide to return, I'm sure the D community will be happy to welcome you back. Either way, thanks for all that you've given us, and best of luck in your future endeavors. :)

On Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 16:26:43 UTC, berni44 wrote:
> Last week, I was quite disappointed when no one replied on my anouncement of a new website about D (meanwhile there are three replies, one negative, two positive, but it's somewhat too late). I'm also waiting for almost three months now for a review of my PRs concerning replacing sprintf (just doing thumbs up isn't enough). Together this made me quite sad.
>
> So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.
>
> I kept all PRs open, because I think they are all ripe to be merged (there is one, where n8sh commented in the last week and his suggestions should be added), but I will neither care for them anymore. Close them, use them or continue to ignore them; I don't mind.
>
> Recently I was working on a complete rewrite of the documentation of std.format with some improvements, bug fixes and stuff. I added also unittests to verify the documentation. It's still work in progress, but it's about 80% finished. Again I will not continue work on this. But I uploaded it on github [1]. You can use it, if you like.
>
> Bye bye
>
> [1] https://github.com/berni44/phobos/blob/formatS/std/format.d


I've had similar experience.  Waited months for someone to look at pull request with no response.  The leadership of the D community does not have enough time to review all the Pull Requests that come in.  There's too few people that can review, and too many good developers leave out of frustration or difference of opinion.  From what I understand, the amount of work to review code in dlang's repositories is relatively low, but the number of people that can and do review is even smaller.

Maybe the leadership needs to spend more time cultivating expertise among the community and delegating roles to sustain the influx of work that comes in? I do know that the leadership has a hard time finding the "right" people that can review code in a way that they are happy with.  I recall Andrei talking about this, and he mentions that when he does try to "let go" he comes back later to find issues with code that got approved that he wasn't able to review.  Of course, we can't all be as good as Andrei :)  It's rare to find someone with his amount of talent and experience.

My advice is to understand that working on the Dlang repositories is typically not going to be quick.  As I've come to learn this, I've naturally come to spend less time working on D and more time working on other things.  I still work on D if there are things I need, but in general I tend to dismiss most of my inclinations to work on things that I would otherwise do if I thought people would be there to review it. Unfortunately, there's not much you or I can do, it's in the hands of the leadership.  They must be waiting for more developers to come along that can review code, but it seems like the current state is deturing those very people sticking around.  Feels like a catch 22 situation.

On 2/6/2020 8:26 AM, berni44 wrote:
> Last week, I was quite disappointed when no one replied on my anouncement of a new website about D (meanwhile there are three replies, one negative, two positive, but it's somewhat too late). I'm also waiting for almost three months now for a review of my PRs concerning replacing sprintf (just doing thumbs up isn't enough). Together this made me quite sad.
> 
> So I decided to stay away for a week to calm down and to have time to think about this. Finally I came to the conclusion, that I do not fit in this community. So I will leave.
> 
> I kept all PRs open, because I think they are all ripe to be merged (there is one, where n8sh commented in the last week and his suggestions should be added), but I will neither care for them anymore. Close them, use them or continue to ignore them; I don't mind.
> 
> Recently I was working on a complete rewrite of the documentation of std.format with some improvements, bug fixes and stuff. I added also unittests to verify the documentation. It's still work in progress, but it's about 80% finished. Again I will not continue work on this. But I uploaded it on github [1]. You can use it, if you like.
> 
> Bye bye
> 
> [1] https://github.com/berni44/phobos/blob/formatS/std/format.d
> 

For reference (Phobos):

9 open:

https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pulls/berni44

70 merged:

https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Aberni44+is%3Aclosed

It does look like you've got a solid track record of success. Thank you!

-----------------

This one is always going to be a tough one:

https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/7264

Floating point code is extremely difficult to get right, and contains a lot of very subtle traps for the unwary. (It's why people are still writing research papers on formatting floating point numbers.) If there's a mistake in it that subtly breaks someone's floating point code, it would cause them to not trust D. Just finding someone capable of reviewing it thoroughly would be very difficult for any community.

It's a bit harsh, but when working on this sort of thing that comes with the territory.

One thing you can do when things are being overlooked is to get behind and push. I often do that - people don't just pull things because I wrote them.