Bill Baxter wrote:
> torhu wrote:
>> David Ferenczi wrote:
>>>>> It seems that this request has been silently ignored. Rejecting
>>>>> would be
>>>>> ok, but ignorance is more than disappointing.
>>>>>
>>>>> I would like to understand the reasons.
>>>>>
>>>>> Could anybody give me some short explanation on this?
>>>>
>>>> It's a one-man project, so the reason there's not much feedback is shortage of manpower.  It's just the way it is, we've all had to get used to this fact.  A one-man project that creates free products can't provide the same level of customer support that a commercial project can.  Hope this explains it.
>>>
>>> Thanks, I agree. But I think it somehow also lies on the topic. There
>>> are
>>> topics, which get attention immediately, and there are others, which
>>> never.
>>>
>>> The point is, just like in case of bug reports, to get some feedback.
>>> Let it
>>> be even a single line.
>>>
>>> If you have a community around your project, it is necessary to
>>> communicate
>>> with them. Or just define some rules, if you don't have time for it.
>>> E.g. I
>>> don't answer mails, newsgroup post, except for...
>>>
>>> The worst can happen to enthusiast users that they get ignored. This
>>> makes
>>> also the recommendation of D questionable.
>>>
>>> My suggestion addressed this kind of situation at bug reports. And the impression is (maybe the truth is totally different) that nobody cares.
>>
>> I fully agree with you.  I expect the situation will improve sooner or later, forced by increasing adoption of D.  How it's going to happen remains to be seen.
> 
> I was watching this Google Tech talk: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645&q=poisonous+people
> 
> from the guys who run Subversion.
> 
> One of the things they mention in there is the importance of responsiveness, and they suggest that some member of the project should be made responsible for addressing all issues that come into the mailing lists that seem to get dropped.

Interestingly, this is kind of how Blizzard handles its customers in World of Warcraft.  When you post on the forums, you basically "talk" to the CMs (or Community Managers), not the devs.

So, let's say you ask "are Druids not supposed to tank in Kharazan?" Presumably, a CM reads this and writes it down on his little list.  He then goes off to the devs and says "yo ma homies, wats up wit the no love on the bears goin' up the tower, man?"

And the devs kinda shrug and say "we'll get back to you," and then don't, or just say "because."

And then the community gets pissy with the CMs for not doing their job, which they really are, but the devs are still as busy now as they are when they decided "we need someone to read the forums for us."

If the people reading the forums really know what's going on, then it's OK; but if they have to go ask the devs, it seems to fall apart, and the community just ends up feeling isolated from the dev team, and that their concerns aren't being heard.

I've made two requests[1] of Walter in my time here (one big and one small), and neither were ever responded to (by *anyone*, actually).  But that's OK because at least I know that Walter is reading the forums.  He usually just responds where he can to things that are important.

... or things that amuse him, but that's cool.  We all need a laugh once in a while :)

Where was I?  Stuffed if I can remember :P

	-- Daniel

[1]: << Waves a tatty piece of cardboard with "return scoped instances" and "set debug source file" written on it somewhat half-heartedly.  In the rain.  With, I dunno... a blues track playing in the background, or something. :P >>

-- 
Unlike Knuth, I have neither proven or tried the above; it may not even make sense.

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Daniel Keep wrote:

> And the devs kinda shrug and say "we'll get back to you," and then
> don't, or just say "because."
> 
> And then the community gets pissy with the CMs for not doing their job,
> which they really are, but the devs are still as busy now as they are
> when they decided "we need someone to read the forums for us."

I don't think that would be an issue with the D community, though, since our "customers" are generally not 12 year old kids paying to play a game.  I think most people here would be satisfied with a response of "Walter's too busy for that one right now but he thinks it's a (good|interesting|terrible|vague) idea".  But we can't even get that unless there's at least *one* person Walter will respond to without fail.

--bb

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
>> And the devs kinda shrug and say "we'll get back to you," and then don't, or just say "because."
>>
>> And then the community gets pissy with the CMs for not doing their job, which they really are, but the devs are still as busy now as they are when they decided "we need someone to read the forums for us."
> 
> I don't think that would be an issue with the D community, though, since our "customers" are generally not 12 year old kids paying to play a game.  I think most people here would be satisfied with a response of "Walter's too busy for that one right now but he thinks it's a (good|interesting|terrible|vague) idea".  But we can't even get that unless there's at least *one* person Walter will respond to without fail.
> 
> --bb

What makes you think the people whining are the 12 year olds?  My mother plays in a guild for, er... I can't say "older people" since my mum IS NOT OLD (Hi Mum!).  Let's say, people who are of an age where they most likely are married with kids. :P

Anyway.  No 12 year olds in her guild.  She *still* has people bitching and whining about utterly pointless and trivial things.  They complain that they don't get enough loot, about class changes, about *everything*.  Age has nothing to do with being pissy -- I think that people only get better at it as they get more experienced at it ;)

That said, the vast majority of people on this NG *are* mature, sensible people.  Of course, once D explodes in popularity, leaving Ruby a shivering, nervous wreck in its wake, I'm 100% certain that we'll get more than our share of whiners...

	-- Daniel

-- 
Unlike Knuth, I have neither proven or tried the above; it may not even make sense.

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Bill Baxter schrieb am 2007-03-17:

<snip>

> That's great for a truly open-source project, but the problem with that suggestion for D is that no-one besides Walter, and maybe now Andrei, is really a "member" of this project.  No one besides Walter has any ownership, so nobody really has any more obligation (or authority) to respond to posts than anyone else.  There probably are people here who would step up to the plate and take on such responsibility if they were given some authority, but no-one has such authority now.  Especially if you want to know "why isn't bug 2345 being fixed?".  No-one knows that besides Walter.  So if someone is going to communicate that to you it has to be someone who has Walter's ear.

Walter most certainly isn't the only one capable to fix the compiler. Ignoring inline assembler (because GDC-0.23 doesn't support it on AMD64) roughly 9% of DStress'[1] test cases with unexpected results behave differently under DMD-1.009 i686 and GDC-0.23 AMD64. This suggest that either DStress contains an overwhelming number of broken test cases or a large proportion of all observed compiler issues are due to the shared open source frontend.

Assuming pessimistically that 50% of the misbehaving test cases are
buggy would result in ca. 360 fixable test cases. A single bug usually
causes 1-10 failing test cases. Thus there are at least 36 bugs everyone -
yes this includes you - can fix and submit patches to GDC and/or DMD.

While the communication issue raised by the GPs is valid the question why bugs aren't fixed seems to be a much more pressing one.

Thomas

[1] http://dstress.kuehne.cn

Thomas Kuehne wrote:
> [...]
> While the communication issue raised by the GPs is valid the question
> why bugs aren't fixed seems to be a much more pressing one.

This is a great point.  While D is more of a Benevolent Dictatorship than an Open-Source community, there is a *lot* that the community can do without Walter (like Mango, Tango, DTL, DDT, Descent, DForms, etc. ad nauseum).  Fixing bugs is important, but working around bugs is an even more important skill.

I spent nearly 10 years of my life putting bread on the table with a commercial compiler with spotty support (Borland C++Builder).  People would report bugs on the forums on an almost daily basis, but you were lucky if 10% of them got fixed in any given patch.  Eventually Borland released a tool to help give visibility to the bugs and progress being made, but it simply was not realistic to expect that even a team of a dozen or more professional compiler writers were going to fix all the bugs.  Instead, you learn to code around them.

Consider Boost.  It's arguably one of the most advanced source code libraries in existence, but it probably has far more conditional compilation than the average library because it demands portability. Most of those conditional blocks are due to compiler bugs in one implementation or another, and yet Boost is a very high-quality product.  Aleksey Gurtovoy got Boost.MPL to compile on VC++ 6.5!  If that is possible, then I'm sure it is possible to work around a good majority of the bugs that exist in D.

That is not to excuse D bugs.  Walter should be lashed with a wet noodle for every bug that exists in the compiler.  But the reality is that if everyone were paying him a $1,000/year support contract, everyone would still have open bugs, all the time (I know, because lots of Borland customers had much more expensive support contracts, and they still complained about open bugs).

In my view, it is important to continue filing bug reports and telling Walter which ones cause the most pain.  But at the same time, it is more productive to work around the bug with an obvious and ugly static if (BUG_123456_ISNT_FIXED_YET) and make progress.  Since the vast majority of areas in which D could use improvement (library support, namely, but tools as well) do not require direct intervention on Walter's part, the community would serve itself best by figuring out how to contribute, rather than how to whine.  And at the end of the day, you will be able to say you got to participate in the development of D.

Another thing which might be helpful is to have a Top 10 Worst Bugs page on the wiki where users can vote for the bugs which cause the most pain, as a hint to Walter where his efforts would be appreciated the most. Maybe there's something like that already, but I haven't stumbled across it.

Finally, the best way to improve D is to take Thomas up on his challenge  and help fix the compiler tests.  If necessary, add finer-grained unit tests.  It may well be that half the bugs reported are fixable in userspace.

Dave