On Wednesday, 28 November 2012 at 21:40:14 UTC, 1100110 wrote:
> On 11/28/2012 02:48 PM, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>> So the plans of a stable releases branch never came into fruition?
>>
>
> Would you be interested in helping?

Wasn't this the same idea?

https://github.com/dlang-stable

On 11/29/2012 2:18 AM, Max Samukha wrote:
>  From my and other people's experience, setting bug severity, voting for
> bugs etc. usually has no effect, so I stopped doing that long ago.
>
> Raised the severity and added a rationale.

Thank you.

On 11/29/2012 12:56 AM, Maxim Fomin wrote:
> Have you thought about adjusting D development model to D growth?
> Perhaps allowing permissive test branch or delegating parts of project
> to maintainers (like with linux)?

Since D is a volunteer organization, my assigning tasks to people tends to not work. What does work is when a champion steps forward to take charge of some aspect. For example, Brad stepped forward to take over bugzilla and the D continuous testing, Vladimir stepped forward to do the D forums, Don stepped forward to champion CTFE, Andrei with Phobos, Sean with Druntime, etc.

I am more than happy to delegate to a champion, and D would be nowhere near where it is today without the numerous champions we have that have all pretty much self-selected themselves.

> Regarding breaking changes vs. keeping cripple features - it is a
> trade-off and certainly somebody will be in a loss position. Probably
> there is need to set up a clear policy - currently there are only talks
> and guesses about each problematic feature.

There's no clear line between fixing a bug and adding a breaking change. In the end, it's a judgement call.

If someone wants to be the champion of a stable D2 version branch, that would be great. His job would be to regularly review changes to D2, merge in the ones that make sense for the stable branch, make sure it gets through its test suite, and prepare releases of it now and then.

On 11/29/2012 1:33 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> The problem with the above is the count of "I", which is too large. We
> need to switch from "I" to "we" so we can scale up.

I understand this, see my other reply here about champions.

Right on, Jonathan.

On 11/29/2012 3:31 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Well, then we're about to reach the point when it's ripe to do that, because
> D1 is about to no longer be supported. With the beta for 2.061 (whenever that
> happens), we can adjust how we do the beta process to properly use branches,
> and then we can adjust how we deal with stable and development branches of D2
> for future releases.

My thoughts, too.

BTW, just so everyone knows, I am currently in Melbourne at the YOW conference. It's the start of a 3 city tour, so I won't get home until Dec. 8. The hotel internet connection is not much more suitable than for email and newsgroups, and my travel laptop is not well suited for dev, so aside from my conference obligations I intend to be doing things like D articles, learning new stuff, and other back-and-fill work until then.

BTW, it's a great conference. There are a lot of freakin' smart people here, which always makes things a joy.

On 11/29/2012 8:10 AM, 1100110 wrote:
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language-Stable/dmd
>
> Phobos and druntime are also in there.
>
> Right now I'm just trying to figure out how to organize it.
>

I think it's great that you're stepping up.

But why do it as a separate github repository rather than a branch on the main one?

On Wed, 2012-11-28 at 13:02 -0600, 1100110 wrote:
> Given that Phobos is still a moving target with new functionality being
> > added on a regular basis, it could be a bit of a disappointment to
> have
> > to wait as long as 6 months to see the latest new features.

Well either you want stable or bleeding edge. New features need to stabilize, have bugs ironed out, might need a redesign, ... That is why they should be introduced in the unstable branch and only after some testing get into the stable branch.

Stable should not only mean that you only receive breaking changes, every six months, but also that the features you use are better tested and mature than in the unstable branch.

In my opinion a stable version should not receive anything but bug fixes. External libraries, most likely will sync with D's development and provide a new stable release after a new D version arrived, which then also only receives bug fixes.

If you are stable, you don't have the newest and coolest features and that is a good thing. If you want them, don't use stable.

Even the unstable branch should stop adding new features let's say at least three months before the next stable release, so all things in stable have been tested at least a certain minimum amount of time in unstable. (People can still work on new features, but only in separate feature branches, which will not be part of the next stable release.) Much like the Linux kernel development: Have a merge window and a stabilization phase, then the release.

If you skip the _stabilization_ or even dare to merge things directly into stable, you don't have anything stable.

A stable release, should in a perfect world not change at all, that's why it is stable, most bugs should have been ironed out, even before it is released. In particular a stable version should not introduce any regressions, which is very much more likely with a few months of testing.

Best regards,

Robert

On 11/28/2012 04:40 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/29/2012 8:10 AM, 1100110 wrote:
>> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language-Stable/dmd
>>
>> Phobos and druntime are also in there.
>>
>> Right now I'm just trying to figure out how to organize it.
>>
>
> I think it's great that you're stepping up.
>
> But why do it as a separate github repository rather than a branch on
> the main one?

I don't have commit privs on the main repo.  =P

So the easiest way is to fork and submit a pull request.  I'm sure I could do that manually, but github makes that part a little easier.

Don't worry, I had planned on pushing upstream.

The extra repo is mainly for my sake.  I get a nice clean slate to mark up anyway i want.  I can make little notes to myself with a personal issue tracker and such.

Plus this way it's easier to get others to help out. We can collaborate on one repo before submitting the changes.

But if you want to go ahead and create the stable branch for me, that'd give me a head start.

On 11/28/2012 04:40 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/29/2012 8:10 AM, 1100110 wrote:
>> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language-Stable/dmd
>>
>> Phobos and druntime are also in there.
>>
>> Right now I'm just trying to figure out how to organize it.
>>
>
> I think it's great that you're stepping up.
>
> But why do it as a separate github repository rather than a branch on
> the main one?

Oh! while I have your attention...  Looking at the makefiles for DMD, all of them are set to build 32bit by default.  Usually that is unset, and the environment that you are compiling in dictates which one is implicitly chosen.

Why have it set to build 32 by default?  It's not an issue or anything, but it's been a long time since I've had a setup capable of build  32bit apps easily.  I always have to change that.  Is there any particular reason that that option is set rather than unset?