Georg Wrede wrote:
> This one seems OK with dmd 1.042.

OK, thanks. I marked it as fixed. I didn't even remember about this bug anymore.

Luís Marques wrote:
> Luís Marques wrote:
>> Two years ago, I tried to use a particular construct and DMD incorrectly detected that a statement was not reachable [1]. OK, D1 had been frozen earlier that year, so I thought it would be only a matter of time until the higher priority stuff had been taken care of and someone took care of this issue. That's my experience with stable languages, even if they aren't particularly mainstream (say, Lua).
> 
> I forgot the reference (even if, as I said, the bug itself is not very important):
> 
> [1] http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1115

I wonder, if giving a higher priority to very old bugs would be a good idea?

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Georg Wrede, el 12 de mayo a las 06:06 me escribiste:
>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> Georg Wrede wrote:
>>>>> From a (go ahead, call it "shrewd" and "marketing liar", I won't mind) perspective, _the_ newsgroup should be called D and it should contain D1 discussions. And then there should be a less conspicuous NG called "future releases discussions", which would be D2.
>>>> Sounds like a good idea.
>>> I'm all for it. My guess, however, is that this is another case of couch quarterbacking that's unlikely to effect a touchdown. Today, the majority of discussions on digitalmars.d is about D2 because - surprise! - the stuff that people are interested in debating has mostly to do with D2. You can't tell people what they should be talking about. People vote with their pens. If a separate newsgroup is created for digitalmars.d.next, then that won't automatically increase the quantity and quality of D1-related traffic on digitalmars.d. Then the archetypal noob tunes to digitalmars.d, sees a tumbleweed rolling by, and moves on.
>> We could rename D.learn to D and D to D.future-issues.
>>
>> Then the two newsgroups would be /appropriately seeded/.
> 
> Other (mostly open source) projects tend to use -users and -devel. I guess
> d-users and d-devel could be used in this case too.


Yes.

Georg Wrede wrote:
> I wonder, if giving a higher priority to very old bugs would be a good idea?

I find it a good idead having the house clean before receiving new guests :-)

Tell me, as I don't follow the development close enough, are the priorities in the bugs actually being followed, in general? I see some people complaining about major bugs not receiving atention for a long time...

Luís Marques wrote:
> Two years ago, I tried to use a particular construct and DMD incorrectly detected that a statement was not reachable [1]. OK, D1 had been frozen earlier that year, so I thought it would be only a matter of time until the higher priority stuff had been taken care of and someone took care of this issue. That's my experience with stable languages, even if they aren't particularly mainstream (say, Lua).

That would be true if the bug list for D1 was shrinking. But it is not, it is growing. A bug's age does not indicate its importance to be fixed.

(The growing number of bugs reflects the increasing usage of D, not that it is going unstable. The number of regressions is very small.)

Walter Bright wrote:
> Luís Marques wrote:
>> Two years ago, I tried to use a particular construct and DMD incorrectly detected that a statement was not reachable [1]. OK, D1 had been frozen earlier that year, so I thought it would be only a matter of time until the higher priority stuff had been taken care of and someone took care of this issue. That's my experience with stable languages, even if they aren't particularly mainstream (say, Lua).
> 
> That would be true if the bug list for D1 was shrinking. But it is not, it is growing. A bug's age does not indicate its importance to be fixed.
> 
> (The growing number of bugs reflects the increasing usage of D, not that it is going unstable. The number of regressions is very small.)

The number of releases for which a bug went unreported is indicative of how seldom it is encountered.

However, if a patch exists, there is only one excuse for not including it: lack of testing. And there is one huge reason that nobody submits additional test cases to your DMD test suite -- you've never released it, or even specified the required format.

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> I know.  How many months has bug 314* had the most votes?  And 313
> while we're at it.  Importing has been broken for years and instead D2
> is getting thread-local variables.  It seems like a gross misdirection
> of effort.

314 does not affect correct code, hence is an implicitly less important issue.

The order of importance of bugs is roughly:

1. silently generating bad code
2. compiler crashes
3. regressions that break previously working code
4. not accepting valid code
5. accepting invalid code
6. poor error messages

Throw into that how much work a bug is to fix, how many projects it affects, if there's a patch submitted, etc.

Christopher Wright wrote:
> However, if a patch exists, there is only one excuse for not including it: lack of testing.


> And there is one huge reason that nobody submits additional test cases to your DMD test suite -- you've never released it, or even specified the required format.

That's because of its uncertain copyright status. It's a collection of everything that went wrong in the past, from a wide variety of sources.

As to its format, it is designed to be run by a shell script. Each source file is expected to compile and run without error, error means terminating with an exception or a non-zero return from main().

In other words, the test suite is designed to not require manual inspection of results, and it halts on the first failure.

A typical test case would look like:

/***************************************************/

template A()
{
  static T foo(T)(T t) { return 7 + t; }
}

struct Bar
{
  mixin A!() a;
}

void test2()
{
  auto i = A!().foo(1);
  assert(i == 8);
  i = Bar.a.foo!(int)(2);
  assert(i == 9);
  i = Bar.a.foo(3);
  assert(i == 10);
}

/*****************************************************/

along with a main() that calls the testNN() functions. The shell script I run is with a custom shell language http://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/shell.html

The custom nature of it is its ability to keep rerunning a group of commands with different combinations of arguments. This is pretty handy for testing with the combinatorial explosion of compiler switches.

Walter Bright wrote:
> 314 does not affect correct code, hence is an implicitly less important issue.

It does however include a patch, submitted almost a year ago I might add. With it having the most votes, applying the patch could give a lot of smiley faces :)

Walter Bright wrote:
> Luís Marques wrote:
>> When D1 was declared finished I thought it meant it would progress to a stable state, with nearly all non-minor problems fixed and a large set of companion libraries. I'm afraid I don't see that happening at an animating rate.
> 
> D1 regularly gets around 20 bug fixes a month. I don't understand why this is not seen as progress to a stable state. About 80% of bug fixes are common to both D2 and D1.

Doesn't the d1.0blocker list speak for itself?

Moreover, Robert has taken the words out of my mouth about why my point (a) is most important.  With the amount of time that has passed since DMD 1.00 was released, people would have expected the language spec to be at a stable state by now.

Stewart.