On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 18:12:41 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 17:37:36 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>> Yah, the whole Trello experiment has been on my tongue during this discussion. It's been made public long before its demise.
>>
>>
>> Andrei
>
> I think it got off to a bad start because it was private and even after it was public it wasn't talked about much within the community (it was hard to even find because it wouldn't turn up in Trello's search). I use and enjoy Trello at work so personally I think I'd try to get everyone to give it another shot if it were up to me.

I've been here on and off for lots of time, and it is the first time I hear about Trello at all :D

On 2/11/14, 10:12 AM, Brad Anderson wrote:
> I think it got off to a bad start because it was private and even after
> it was public it wasn't talked about much within the community (it was
> hard to even find because it wouldn't turn up in Trello's search). I use
> and enjoy Trello at work so personally I think I'd try to get everyone
> to give it another shot if it were up to me.

I'm also in favor of a second go, particularly since I've initiated the first one :o). I'm still using Trello for tracking personal stuff, though not nearly as frequently as to make a big difference.

Andrei

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 18:50:56 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> One simple example: specific regressions and blockers in bugzilla.

Are those the same as the one's which are marked as bounties? It could be that those problems are simply hard to fix. Many of them seem to be backend or debugging-related bugs. I'm saying not many people know how to fix these.

On 2/11/14, 10:55 AM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 18:50:56 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> One simple example: specific regressions and blockers in bugzilla.
>
> Are those the same as the one's which are marked as bounties?

No.

> It could
> be that those problems are simply hard to fix. Many of them seem to be
> backend or debugging-related bugs. I'm saying not many people know how
> to fix these.

1. Not at all. Many were trivial issues technically. Walter and I fixed a few ourselves in short time. Kenji also is very active on those. For other contributors, there is no clear message of how damaging regressions are and how they delay our releases.

2. People work on harder problems. As an example I learned about literally yesterday: Martin Nowak is working on a REPL for D. Was it on our roadmap? No, not on the short list, not even on a longer list if there was one. Would I tell Martin to do a REPL? No. Would I tell Martin to drop work on the REPL and work on higher-impact items such as shared libraries on Windows and OSX? No. Do I like the idea of D having a REPL? Sure, and I'm thankful for it.

3. In the mythical organization, barring exceptional circumstances, people don't tell their managers: "Well, I understand this task you assigned to me is important, but it's hard to fix. Tell you what. I'll work on something else instead."


Andrei

11-Feb-2014 21:37, Andrei Alexandrescu пишет:
> On 2/11/14, 9:27 AM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
>> 11-Feb-2014 21:12, Andrei Alexandrescu пишет:
>>> On 2/11/14, 6:34 AM, Dicebot wrote:
>>
>> I'd risk suggesting introducing something simple and self-organizable.
>> To be concrete: define "interest groups" by major areas of D ecosystem
>> (Fronted, one for each backend, druntime as a whole, GC alone, Phobos in
>> bits and pieces ...)  and let people join/leave/lead these.
>>
>> At the very least it would make it obvious who is into what at which
>> point of time. Even more importantly - who you'd need to ask about what.
>>
>> The only question is where to track this stuff - maybe Wiki?
>
> Could you please set up a sample wiki page so we get a better feel. Thanks.
>

Here is a sketch. Sorry couldn't make it more realistic -  I'm packing my stuff for tomorrow's flight (about 6 hours to go):
http://wiki.dlang.org/Groups

The fact that I couldn't remember a hell lot of people in each area of expertise/interest proves the point - it has to be driven by individuals and generated automatically.

Think of it as a "phone book". Or better a page "Who is who in D language" for dlang.org that lists key areas in D ecosystem and contacts of people working/interested in them.

The thing is I want this kind of page to be dynamic and self-organizable by very simple rules:

1. A D-guy has github account and an e-mail. (We may go beyond that e.g. IRC nickname, Skype etc. but let it grow organically)

2. Joins and leaves groups.

3. May be designated a leader, the "goto guy" in some group.

The list of who's where is constantly kept up to date from this information. The extras could be grown on top this as needed.

Nothing too fancy, probably could be hacked in an evening with Vibe.d (or say even PHP, who cares as long as it works).

>> P.S. Trello was a failed experiment, but IMHO it failed largely due to
>> being behind the closed doors.
>
> Yah, the whole Trello experiment has been on my tongue during this
> discussion.
>It's been made public long before its demise.

Thing is that I for one lost all the steam trying to get at it early on. By the moment it was public I couldn't care less, to make things work unlike github there simply was no way to contribute for an outsider.

-- 
Dmitry Olshansky

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 17:55:36 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I think at this stage we need more people to start with. Someone pointed out recently we have 77 lifetime contributors to github, as opposed to e.g. Rust which has 292.

It's unfortunate that D's biggest competitor is Rust. Being pushed by Mozilla means they automatically have access to a larger pool of contributors that contribute to other Mozilla stuff, who probably wouldn't have contributed to Rust otherwise.

However, I think DDMD will bring about a small bump in contributors. Personally, I haven't used C++ in awhile, and I've grown rusty. At this point, D is probably the language I'm most comfortable with, especially for hacking on something complex like a compiler. I imagine there are at least a few people who feel the same way and are waiting for DDMD before they take a crack at contributing.

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 18:52:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 2/11/14, 10:12 AM, Brad Anderson wrote:
>> I think it got off to a bad start because it was private and even after
>> it was public it wasn't talked about much within the community (it was
>> hard to even find because it wouldn't turn up in Trello's search). I use
>> and enjoy Trello at work so personally I think I'd try to get everyone
>> to give it another shot if it were up to me.
>
> I'm also in favor of a second go, particularly since I've initiated the first one :o). I'm still using Trello for tracking personal stuff, though not nearly as frequently as to make a big difference.
>
> Andrei

Although I haven't yet contributed to the project by sending any pull requests I am interested in doing so. Perhaps the main thing that keeps holding me back is I feel it is hard to know what currently is being worked on with the current setup (i.e. who is doing what, will my efforts duplicate someone else's, will I be stepping on anyone's toes, will my solution idea be incompatible with the direction in which the language is moving). I frequent the forums and still find it hard to get an overall picture. This is probably my lack of not trying hard enough (e.g. I never have time to spend on IRC). I saw the Trello board before and I felt that it helped me get up to speed on who is doing what, what is being worked on, etc. If you brought it, or something like it, back that would be appreciated.

Sorry to change the subject but one thing that keeps discouraging me from trying to contribute code changes is the large number of unmerged pull requests in GitHub. Since I am not a reviewer I am afraid that any effort I perform will get ignored and so I hold back since I have other stuff to do too. I know that this is something that concerns you a lot from reading other forums discussions so I apologize if this sounds like a complaint. I appreciate the work of all involved and know that no one has infinite time or energy. Not even sure if I could contribute to the code-base but would be nice to try.

Managing a project is never easy. My hat's off to you and Walter for your efforts in that regard.

Joseph

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 20:02:45 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 17:55:36 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> I think at this stage we need more people to start with. Someone pointed out recently we have 77 lifetime contributors to github, as opposed to e.g. Rust which has 292.
>
> It's unfortunate that D's biggest competitor is Rust. Being pushed by Mozilla means they automatically have access to a larger pool of contributors that contribute to other Mozilla stuff, who probably wouldn't have contributed to Rust otherwise.
>
> However, I think DDMD will bring about a small bump in contributors. Personally, I haven't used C++ in awhile, and I've grown rusty. At this point, D is probably the language I'm most comfortable with, especially for hacking on something complex like a compiler. I imagine there are at least a few people who feel the same way and are waiting for DDMD before they take a crack at contributing.

I have to agree. It's been over ten years since I have done any C++ seriously and as a result feel a lot of friction when trying to get up to speed on working with the D compiler code-base. Truth be told, that is part of the reason I like D in the end, it's not C++. Being able to use D to hack on the compiler would make it much more feasible for me to contribute.

Joseph

I just want to chime in here with Andrei, and emphasize that we don't tell anyone what to do here.

We do try to lead, inspire, cajole, reward, acknowledge, promote, etc., with varying degrees of success.

On 2/11/14, 12:31 PM, Joseph Cassman wrote:
> Although I haven't yet contributed to the project by sending any pull
> requests I am interested in doing so. Perhaps the main thing that keeps
> holding me back is I feel it is hard to know what currently is being
> worked on with the current setup (i.e. who is doing what, will my
> efforts duplicate someone else's, will I be stepping on anyone's toes,
> will my solution idea be incompatible with the direction in which the
> language is moving). I frequent the forums and still find it hard to get
> an overall picture. This is probably my lack of not trying hard enough
> (e.g. I never have time to spend on IRC). I saw the Trello board before
> and I felt that it helped me get up to speed on who is doing what, what
> is being worked on, etc. If you brought it, or something like it, back
> that would be appreciated.

Thanks for the feedback. Hanging out on IRC should not be necessary.

> Sorry to change the subject but one thing that keeps discouraging me
> from trying to contribute code changes is the large number of unmerged
> pull requests in GitHub.

Yes. I think that's a disaster. We need to figure out the right approach to solving that.

> Since I am not a reviewer I am afraid that any
> effort I perform will get ignored and so I hold back since I have other
> stuff to do too. I know that this is something that concerns you a lot
> from reading other forums discussions so I apologize if this sounds like
> a complaint. I appreciate the work of all involved and know that no one
> has infinite time or energy. Not even sure if I could contribute to the
> code-base but would be nice to try.
>
> Managing a project is never easy. My hat's off to you and Walter for
> your efforts in that regard.

Thanks! We're doing best we can but I am convinced we can do a lot better, and am looking at some out-of-the-box things to try.


Andrei