OK, do not expect SDC to compile your code yet, but it got to a point where the base is fairly stable, and thing can get better. I compiled a list of high impact items, ranging from relatively easy bug fixes, to compiler guru level.

https://github.com/deadalnix/SDC/wiki/TODO-list

If some of you want to contribute, that'd be awesome. SDC can happen, and you can be a part of this, so go cloning the repo now :)

On Wednesday, 15 April 2015 at 08:13:20 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> OK, do not expect SDC to compile your code yet, but it got to a point where the base is fairly stable, and thing can get better. I compiled a list of high impact items, ranging from relatively easy bug fixes, to compiler guru level.
>
> https://github.com/deadalnix/SDC/wiki/TODO-list
>
> If some of you want to contribute, that'd be awesome. SDC can happen, and you can be a part of this, so go cloning the repo now :)

That's a nice list to get more people involved.  I've been
calling for Andrei/Walter to put up a similar list on the D wiki,
with specific issues they think need dealing with or that would
be pre-approved.

On 4/15/15 8:42 PM, Joakim wrote:
> On Wednesday, 15 April 2015 at 08:13:20 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> OK, do not expect SDC to compile your code yet, but it got to a point
>> where the base is fairly stable, and thing can get better. I compiled
>> a list of high impact items, ranging from relatively easy bug fixes,
>> to compiler guru level.
>>
>> https://github.com/deadalnix/SDC/wiki/TODO-list
>>
>> If some of you want to contribute, that'd be awesome. SDC can happen,
>> and you can be a part of this, so go cloning the repo now :)
>
> That's a nice list to get more people involved.  I've been
> calling for Andrei/Walter to put up a similar list on the D wiki,
> with specific issues they think need dealing with or that would
> be pre-approved.

Forgive my being skeptical but my repeated appeals to contributions - most of them important, urgent, and of high impact - sometimes labeled with [WORK] in this forum, have been answered by the same very small kernel of contributors (including Walter and myself), regardless of their difficulty (sometimes trivial). Lists, labels, management techniques that are touted in this forum every few months or so - no avail. The vision document that everybody asked about? Read and dutifully ignored - back to the next naming debate. The sad reality is that if one of about a handful of core folks doesn't do it, it won't get done. My resolution is to do more of everything; that way more of everything will get done. -- Andrei

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 09:05:18PM -0700, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> Forgive my being skeptical but my repeated appeals to contributions - most of them important, urgent, and of high impact - sometimes labeled with [WORK] in this forum, have been answered by the same very small kernel of contributors (including Walter and myself), regardless of their difficulty (sometimes trivial). Lists, labels, management techniques that are touted in this forum every few months or so - no avail. The vision document that everybody asked about? Read and dutifully ignored - back to the next naming debate. The sad reality is that if one of about a handful of core folks doesn't do it, it won't get done. My resolution is to do more of everything; that way more of everything will get done. -- Andrei

This is why I've reduced my participation in forum threads... It's much more productive to submit PRs than to engage in endless debates that, at the end of the day, don't have very much to show for the amount of energy expended in the discussion. Well, lately I've also been busy with other stuff, so I haven't been that active on github either, but hopefully I'll get back to it someday.


T

-- 
People walk. Computers run.

On Thursday, 16 April 2015 at 04:05:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Forgive my being skeptical but my repeated appeals to contributions - most of them important, urgent, and of high impact - sometimes labeled with [WORK] in this forum, have been answered by the same very small kernel of contributors (including Walter and myself), regardless of their difficulty (sometimes trivial). Lists, labels, management techniques that are touted in this forum every few months or so - no avail. The vision document that everybody asked about? Read and dutifully ignored - back to the next naming debate. The sad reality is that if one of about a handful of core folks doesn't do it, it won't get done. My resolution is to do more of everything; that way more of everything will get done. -- Andrei

I understand that it's frustrating to get stuff done on a decentralized open source project, but you have to help contributors a bit in order for them to help you.  Your [WORK] appeals have been a great step- I had one of them open in my browser to remind me to get to it, but Walter beat me to it- but the forum is not easy to keep track of and navigate for newbies.  How much harder would it be for you to stick all those in a single wiki page, to make it easier for noobs to find and easy for us to point them at?  That's all I'm asking for.  As far as I can tell, lists and bugzilla labels have not actually been tried yet, so you cannot dismiss them so easily.

As for the vision document, it was definitely a step in the right direction, so that the community is clear on the vision of the BDFLs, but it was a little less concrete than I would have liked.  Back it up with some concrete lists of issues for each vision item and it would go a lot further, for example, what are the five bugzilla issues that would most help improve quality of implementation?  Without listing those, it's just airy talk, missing specific steps you'd like to see taken.

Of course, you can go to all the trouble of coming up with a list of action items and nobody outside the core group may still contribute, as I said from the beginning.  But if you don't make it easier for new or non-core contributors, you just lowered the odds of them pitching in from 7% to 1%.  All we're trying to do is raise those odds, and I don't think a list will take you or Walter much time, just like this one deadalnix put up.

On Thursday, 16 April 2015 at 05:07:57 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Of course, you can go to all the trouble of coming up with a list of action items and nobody outside the core group may still contribute, as I said from the beginning.  But if you don't make it easier for new or non-core contributors, you just lowered the odds of them pitching in from 7% to 1%.  All we're trying to do is raise those odds, and I don't think a list will take you or Walter much time, just like this one deadalnix put up.

It is not absurd, but the time I spent on this could have been spent on solving one of the point. Let's see how it turns out. If nobody picks anything, then it wouldn't have been a good use of my time, but I won't know without trying.

On 4/15/15 10:07 PM, Joakim wrote:
>
> I understand that it's frustrating to get stuff done on a decentralized
> open source project, but you have to help contributors a bit in order
> for them to help you.  Your [WORK] appeals have been a great step- I had
> one of them open in my browser to remind me to get to it, but Walter
> beat me to it- but the forum is not easy to keep track of and navigate
> for newbies. How much harder would it be for you to stick all those in a
> single wiki page, to make it easier for noobs to find and easy for us to
> point them at?  That's all I'm asking for.  As far as I can tell, lists
> and bugzilla labels have not actually been tried yet, so you cannot
> dismiss them so easily.
>
> As for the vision document, it was definitely a step in the right
> direction, so that the community is clear on the vision of the BDFLs,
> but it was a little less concrete than I would have liked.  Back it up
> with some concrete lists of issues for each vision item and it would go
> a lot further, for example, what are the five bugzilla issues that would
> most help improve quality of implementation?  Without listing those,
> it's just airy talk, missing specific steps you'd like to see taken.
>
> Of course, you can go to all the trouble of coming up with a list of
> action items and nobody outside the core group may still contribute, as
> I said from the beginning.  But if you don't make it easier for new or
> non-core contributors, you just lowered the odds of them pitching in
> from 7% to 1%.  All we're trying to do is raise those odds, and I don't
> think a list will take you or Walter much time, just like this one
> deadalnix put up.

This is good stuff. FWIW we do have a keyword "preapproved" on bugzilla:

https://issues.dlang.org/buglist.cgi?f1=keywords&list_id=200200&o1=equals&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&v1=preapproved

It has 23 items of various ages. I didn't notice the presence of the keyword helping in any way. So spending time annotating issues with "preapproved" is possibly a waste of time. I suspect maintaining lists of stuff to do is also low-impact.

Yeah, we know what to do. A ton of it is easy to derive directly from the vision, do I need to provide the food already chewed? Eliminate gratuitous garbage from Phobos, create good unique and reference counted types (and see if we need something beside DIP25 to make them safe), improve associative arrays (apparently there's no reasonable way to free an AA manually...), documentation, documentation, documentation... there's a bunch of stuff to do all over the difficulty spectrum. It's painfully trivial to find easy and high impact stuff to work on. That's not low-hanging fruit, it's fruit that falls into one's lap.

Now that I got started, there are two more topics that I think we could do a lot better at:

1. Challenging Walter on anything and everything seems to have become a rite of passage in our community. Some of the reviews of his code are the most petty and meaningless I've seen in my career, bar none. It doesn't help that he doesn't budge on some of the petty issues, thus a vicious circle gets created. In a recent review, after his code had been pecked within an inch of its death, it took me minutes to find two bugs that nobody had the eyes for in spite of every token of his code having been scrutinized.

2. Turning the hay over and over and over again. I've mentioned this before - there's just an astounding amount of tweaking and shuffling and moving around code that works well under serious-sounding pretexts such as "refactoring" and "maintenance". Sometimes really difficult stuff, too. A lot of it is low-impact work that makes Phobos' codebase look horribly overcooked. There's been more than one instance when I revisited some file I knew most of the code of. Elegant solutions. Nimble code. Just to find it mutated into the stuff of Agent Smith's world. One horrible contraption layered on top of another to the extent it's difficult to find where work is being done.

There is a way out of this, and that for us all to give good examples that demonstrate what good contributions are and what good reviews are.


Andrei

On 2015-04-16 08:02, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> This is good stuff. FWIW we do have a keyword "preapproved" on bugzilla:
>
> https://issues.dlang.org/buglist.cgi?f1=keywords&list_id=200200&o1=equals&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&v1=preapproved
>
>
> It has 23 items of various ages. I didn't notice the presence of the
> keyword helping in any way. So spending time annotating issues with
> "preapproved" is possibly a waste of time. I suspect maintaining lists
> of stuff to do is also low-impact.

I've been working on the Objective-C support for quite a while. I'm on my third rewrite due to comments in previous pull requests. The latest pull request [1] was created in January, it's basically been stalled since February due to lack of review and Walter has not made a single comment at all in this pull request.

I did the rewrites to comply with the requests Walter made in previous pull requests. Although not present as a bugzilla issue with the "preapproved" tag, I did interpreted it as preapproved based on a forum post made by you [2].

I know that focus has shifted to GC, reference counting, C++ and so on, but you're not making it easy for someone to contribute.

[1] https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/4321
[2] http://forum.dlang.org/post/lfoe82$17c0$1@digitalmars.com

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Thursday, 16 April 2015 at 06:02:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> 1. Challenging Walter on anything and everything seems to have become a rite of passage in our community. Some of the reviews of his code are the most petty and meaningless I've seen in my career, bar none. It doesn't help that he doesn't budge on some of the petty issues, thus a vicious circle gets created. In a recent review, after his code had been pecked within an inch of its death, it took me minutes to find two bugs that nobody had the eyes for in spite of every token of his code having been scrutinized.

I've recently been guilty of this[1], and I stand behind my nitpicking 100%. The code was fine, but toCapitalize was a bad enough name (being improper English) that I felt compelled to comment. Spiritus quidem promptus; caro vero infirma.

On 16 Apr 2015 05:45, "Joakim via Digitalmars-d" < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, 15 April 2015 at 08:13:20 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>>
>> OK, do not expect SDC to compile your code yet, but it got to a point
where the base is fairly stable, and thing can get better. I compiled a list of high impact items, ranging from relatively easy bug fixes, to compiler guru level.
>>
>> https://github.com/deadalnix/SDC/wiki/TODO-list
>>
>> If some of you want to contribute, that'd be awesome. SDC can happen,
and you can be a part of this, so go cloning the repo now :)
>
>
> That's a nice list to get more people involved.  I've been calling for Andrei/Walter to put up a similar list on the D wiki, with specific issues they think need dealing with or that would be pre-approved.

I don't think such a thing on the wiki actually works.   Learned from back in the days I was part-managing the Ubuntu forums, there's a difference between putting up announcement (on the front page) and people actually reading it.

http://wiki.dlang.org/GDC/ProjectIdeas

Maybe I should have named the page 'TODO' :)