January 01, 2018
On Sun, 31 Dec 2017 23:50:04 +0000, Mengu wrote:

> - d leadership is dusty and so are their tools. we are no js community and hope we never become anything like them but bugzilla is a hundred years old. i am on github, i am on this ml and i also need a bugzilla account?

That's probably not the best method of effecting change.

With the exception of the "Add me to CC list" interface (which is inexcusable) I like Bugzilla. It might be possible to clean things up a bit to better utilize it, but it offers more flexibility than Github's simple issue tracker does (there's a reason Atlassian is able to sell Jira to Bitbucket users even with a tracker integrated into Bitbucket).

Druntime and Phobos are so closely integrated that being able to search for issues on both of them at once can be helpful; I would sometimes require two separate searches if they were on Github.
January 01, 2018
On Sun, 31 Dec 2017 17:19:22 -0700, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> Yes, it would be a pain to switch away from github at this point, but if github went down permanently tomorrow, it would just be an annoying roadblock. We almost certainly wouldn't lose any code (at most, a few commits, if no one pulled recently enough), and we wouldn't lose any bug reports. We'd have to go to the trouble of setting up our own gitlab or switching to bitbucket or something like that and pointing all of the automated stuff to the new place, and it would be a royal pain, but we wouldn't lose any information. If all of the issues were on github, and github went away, we'd lose them.
> 
> Sure, github is unlikely to go away, but I see no reason to tie ourselves to it thoroughly enough that we're going to lose data if they go away - especially since I don't actually see any benefit in switching to github issues.

If only one person has access to Bugzilla, we're actually at a greater risk now than if we used Github for issues. If we don't have regular backups to a location accessible to multiple members of the core team, we shouldn't consider Bugzilla to be a reliable data repository.


--Ryan
January 01, 2018
On Sunday, 31 December 2017 at 21:16:35 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/31/2017 8:18 AM, IM wrote:
>> What do you think? Do you agree that a process is needed?
>
> We've tried adding process before. It does not work, for the simple reason that it requires a dedicated group of people to dedicate time to it.

Something should work. It just needs to be found. People are already dedicating time to D by contributing fixes and filing issues, responding on the forums, ... etc. Organizing work and priorities is not an exception. It doesn't take that long by the way, only 30 ~ 60 minutes per week max should be more than enough. I hope you could take the upcoming DConf as an opportunity to discuss with others ways to enhance the process and minimize friction.


> Are you willing to do that?
>

I'd be happy to do it, but I'm not the right person for it. This needs someone who knows D very well, knows the bigger picture, and is familiar with the contributors and who mostly works on what to be able to adjust priorities and ownership appropriately. I've been learning and experimenting with D only for a few months. Also, I'm worried about - though unlikely - to put myself in a conflict-of-interest situation; we don't use D at work, and as far as I know there are neither interest nor plans to do so. I hope this will change one day, and that's why I started this post, because quality and maturity are very important.

> We have added process when someone has stepped up to do the thankless job of administering it.

I think it is thankful and as important as submitting PRs and DIPs. Shaping, organizing, and directing human effort are just as important as the human effort itself.


January 01, 2018
On Monday, 1 January 2018 at 02:02:03 UTC, rjframe wrote:
> That's probably not the best method of effecting change.

It killed off the discussion nicely, indeed.

I am just going to share my thoughts a little. Github, in my opinion, is hype and even though I depend on it today, I am trying to decrease that dependency. We should build a world that is not dependent on single companies. I am not downplaying what github has done for us (I am one of the early users) - but they have just become a little too important for free software to be comfortable. The github issue tracker is wanting anyway.

D is a great language. I just spent 6 months in C++ and the last month worked on a D multi-threaded project again. I'll blog about this soon, but the short of it is that I am very grateful to Walter, Andrei, Kai, Ian, Johan and others for creating a language that fits our needs so well! D software is doing critical work around the world every second. D is probably not a language for the hype community - let them have Go and Rust. I honestly don't care. And D should not care. Great programmers gyrate to powerful languages and toolboxes. I love I can read the source code of Phobos and understand it. I love I get low level access to stack variables. I love I can manipulate the heap in any way I want. I love we can target GPU and KNL. I love we have Maybe even though it is called Nullable...

A great programmer can handle D fine. As it is. Let's not try to be the next hype. Let's keep writing great software.

Pj.
January 02, 2018
On Monday, 1 January 2018 at 18:32:37 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> On Monday, 1 January 2018 at 02:02:03 UTC, rjframe wrote:
>> That's probably not the best method of effecting change.
>
> It killed off the discussion nicely, indeed.
>
> I am just going to share my thoughts a little. Github, in my opinion, is hype and even though I depend on it today, I am trying to decrease that dependency. We should build a world that is not dependent on single companies. I am not downplaying what github has done for us (I am one of the early users) - but they have just become a little too important for free software to be comfortable. The github issue tracker is wanting anyway.
>
> D is a great language. I just spent 6 months in C++ and the last month worked on a D multi-threaded project again. I'll blog about this soon, but the short of it is that I am very grateful to Walter, Andrei, Kai, Ian, Johan and others for creating a language that fits our needs so well! D software is doing critical work around the world every second. D is probably not a language for the hype community - let them have Go and Rust. I honestly don't care. And D should not care. Great programmers gyrate to powerful languages and toolboxes. I love I can read the source code of Phobos and understand it. I love I get low level access to stack variables. I love I can manipulate the heap in any way I want. I love we can target GPU and KNL. I love we have Maybe even though it is called Nullable...
>
> A great programmer can handle D fine. As it is. Let's not try to be the next hype. Let's keep writing great software.
>
+10000


January 02, 2018
On Tue, Jan 02, 2018 at 09:57:08AM +0000, Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 1 January 2018 at 18:32:37 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:
[...]
> > I am just going to share my thoughts a little. Github, in my opinion, is hype and even though I depend on it today, I am trying to decrease that dependency. We should build a world that is not dependent on single companies. I am not downplaying what github has done for us (I am one of the early users) - but they have just become a little too important for free software to be comfortable. The github issue tracker is wanting anyway.
> > 
> > D is a great language. I just spent 6 months in C++ and the last month worked on a D multi-threaded project again. I'll blog about this soon, but the short of it is that I am very grateful to Walter, Andrei, Kai, Ian, Johan and others for creating a language that fits our needs so well! D software is doing critical work around the world every second. D is probably not a language for the hype community - let them have Go and Rust. I honestly don't care. And D should not care. Great programmers gyrate to powerful languages and toolboxes. I love I can read the source code of Phobos and understand it. I love I get low level access to stack variables. I love I can manipulate the heap in any way I want. I love we can target GPU and KNL. I love we have Maybe even though it is called Nullable...
> > 
> > A great programmer can handle D fine. As it is. Let's not try to be the next hype. Let's keep writing great software.
> > 
> +10000

+10000 * 2


T

-- 
It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages. -- Henry Ford
January 04, 2018
On Tuesday, 2 January 2018 at 16:32:50 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 02, 2018 at 09:57:08AM +0000, Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Monday, 1 January 2018 at 18:32:37 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> [...]
>> > I am just going to share my thoughts a little. Github, in my opinion, is hype and even though I depend on it today, I am trying to decrease that dependency. We should build a world that is not dependent on single companies. I am not downplaying what github has done for us (I am one of the early users) - but they have just become a little too important for free software to be comfortable. The github issue tracker is wanting anyway.
>> > 
>> > D is a great language. I just spent 6 months in C++ and the last month worked on a D multi-threaded project again. I'll blog about this soon, but the short of it is that I am very grateful to Walter, Andrei, Kai, Ian, Johan and others for creating a language that fits our needs so well! D software is doing critical work around the world every second. D is probably not a language for the hype community - let them have Go and Rust. I honestly don't care. And D should not care. Great programmers gyrate to powerful languages and toolboxes. I love I can read the source code of Phobos and understand it. I love I get low level access to stack variables. I love I can manipulate the heap in any way I want. I love we can target GPU and KNL. I love we have Maybe even though it is called Nullable...
>> > 
>> > A great programmer can handle D fine. As it is. Let's not try to be the next hype. Let's keep writing great software.
>> > 
>> +10000
>
> +10000 * 2
>
>
> T

To clarify, I too like D. It is certainly very pleasant to work with. This post wasn't about GitHub issues vs Bugzilla. That was a get-off-at-a-tangent topic. This post is about what's needed for a more mature D; mature enough for extremely big companies to build bigger and more critical parts of their tech stacks in D (this *is* a huge investment)! The goal is never about making D a hype language.

I agree, a great programmer can handle anything, not just D as it is, but that's never an excuse to be complacent, it's never an excuse not aim for a higher quality in the D compiler and the infrastructure. Hope you understand.

Thanks.
January 04, 2018
On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 05:28:40 UTC, IM wrote:
>
> To clarify, I too like D. It is certainly very pleasant to work with. This post wasn't about GitHub issues vs Bugzilla. That was a get-off-at-a-tangent topic. This post is about what's needed for a more mature D; mature enough for extremely big companies to build bigger and more critical parts of their tech stacks in D (this *is* a huge investment)! The goal is never about making D a hype language.
>
> I agree, a great programmer can handle anything, not just D as it is, but that's never an excuse to be complacent, it's never an excuse not aim for a higher quality in the D compiler and the infrastructure. Hope you understand.
>
> Thanks.

D is one of the most interesting and easy to use languages I've seen in a very long time, and I really enjoy 'playing' with it.

However...what D needs, IMHO, is a strategy to better handle defects - as opposed to wishfully hoping that something will arise out of the chaos of bugzilla.

This is not my area of experise, but, if I were a manager evaluating the merits of D for use in a corporate software project, and then I went off to bugzilla and looked at the items for D.. I'd pause and think.....wtf is going on here.

I don't know how other open source projects manage this, or how other mainstream languages manage this, but I would assume there are 'best practices' out there...somewhere.

I doubt very much whether just allowing stuff to pile up in some bugzilla repository, is a best practice.

January 04, 2018
On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 06:16:45 UTC, codephantom wrote:

>
> I doubt very much whether just allowing stuff to pile up in some bugzilla repository, is a best practice.

Several bugs get wiped in each release, as the changelogs clearly show. It's not as if they're being ignored.

If you know how to get a bunch of volunteers with such varied interests to work in a concerted direction, please do tell. And I'm not being facetious here. There have been attempts in the past to bring some sort of order to the chaos so that the perception matches the reality, but it's not something that has yet proven sustainable. As a result, bugs that no one steps up to fix get left in bugzilla for ages.

I have an idea I'm working on to potentially help get older bugs squashed and older PRs merged. I need to hash out the details before getting it going, but I'll blog about when (and if) it comes to fruition. There are no guarantees it will be effective, but it's worth a shot.

In the meantime, you could help reduce the pile by picking a bug to fix today. Multiple people, particularly those concerned about the number of old issues still open, who donate one or two days a month to fixing old bugs could go along way. The same goes for reviewing PRs.




January 04, 2018
On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 06:39:24 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>
> If you know how to get a bunch of volunteers with such varied interests to work in a concerted direction, please do tell.

This is the mystery behind everything in the universe.

Why haven't you solved it yet?