August 18, 2014
On Monday, 18 August 2014 at 22:20:19 UTC, ketmar via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2014 22:01:24 +0000
> bachmeier via Digitalmars-d-announce
> <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> What's the advantage of this over maintaing packages for the RC
>> version until it's ready?
> 'cause not releasing periodically means "ah, it will never be ready!
> let's look at another language, D is not worth using yet."

I don't see how infrequent, stable releases are more likely to provoke that reaction than frequent, unstable releases.
August 18, 2014
On Mon, 18 Aug 2014 22:48:00 +0000
Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce
<digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> I don't see how infrequent, stable releases are more likely to provoke that reaction than frequent, unstable releases.
"stability" is something that cannot be achieved in living language. and having official releases with new features is important to show that project is alive and "mature".

i myself using dmd-git-head and heavily ;-) patched gdc, but when i tried to convince my co-workers to use D, they looked at the page with releases first. not feature list or some comparisons. neither to "buglist". "as this is relatively young language, it must have frequent releases with bugfixes and new features!" they tolerate some regressions in some releases, but they want to see that releases.

don't ask me why they thinking like this. i don't know. but it's the fact.


August 18, 2014
On Monday, 18 August 2014 at 21:57:19 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Vladimir Panteleev:
>
>> I agree, I am also surprised that 2.066 was released despite the regressions.
>
> There is an apparently endless stream of regressions, I have found another today (https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13321 ). I think D is not yet at the stage of its development where it can hope to fix all the regressions. So if you try to wait for all regressions to be fixed, you never ship a compiler version, and this has serious disadvantages. So better to be a little more practical for now. 2.066 has took ages to come out, it was overdue. I hope 2.067 will come out much quicker.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

I have checked the regression list daily since something like b3 - amount of "hard" regressions was steadily going down and many of newly added one were trivial and fixed quickly. Last time I checked there were only 2-3 really problematic cases (including one I have mentioned).

Idea is quite simple - if we are incapable of doing compiler release without regressions, we should stop doing compiler releases until we learn how to do it. Risk of reputation damage we may get with 2.066 costs much more than delaying release even for several months. Remember, we are speaking about regressions, not even about critical bugs.

I also propose to start 2.067 beta branch right now and declare it yet another bug-fixing release.
August 18, 2014
On Monday, 18 August 2014 at 23:14:45 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> I also propose to start 2.067 beta branch right now and declare it yet another bug-fixing release.

Isn't this what point-releases are for, though?
August 18, 2014
On Monday, 18 August 2014 at 23:18:46 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Monday, 18 August 2014 at 23:14:45 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> I also propose to start 2.067 beta branch right now and declare it yet another bug-fixing release.
>
> Isn't this what point-releases are for, though?

Why can't we have both? :) Point is that with current tempo it will take exactly 1.5-2 months to fix all stuff for next release if we start right now, otherwise it is likely to take as long as 2.066
August 19, 2014
On 8/18/2014 7:07 PM, ketmar via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2014 22:48:00 +0000
> Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce
> <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't see how infrequent, stable releases are more likely to
>> provoke that reaction than frequent, unstable releases.
> "stability" is something that cannot be achieved in living language.
> and having official releases with new features is important to show
> that project is alive and "mature".
>
> i myself using dmd-git-head and heavily ;-) patched gdc, but when i
> tried to convince my co-workers to use D, they looked at the page with
> releases first. not feature list or some comparisons. neither to
> "buglist". "as this is relatively young language, it must have frequent
> releases with bugfixes and new features!" they tolerate some
> regressions in some releases, but they want to see that releases.
>
> don't ask me why they thinking like this. i don't know. but it's the
> fact.
>

Well, people will invent *any* excuse to pass over anything they don't feel like bothering with. It sounds like that's probably what they were doing.

August 19, 2014
On 8/18/2014 7:14 PM, Dicebot wrote:
>
> I also propose to start 2.067 beta branch right now and declare it yet
> another bug-fixing release.

Seconded.

August 19, 2014
On Tuesday, 19 August 2014 at 00:23:22 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 8/18/2014 7:14 PM, Dicebot wrote:
>>
>> I also propose to start 2.067 beta branch right now and declare it yet
>> another bug-fixing release.
>
> Seconded.

Regardless of whether we start another release going that quickly or not, I think that we really need to figure out how to be doing regressionless releases more along the lines of 2 months apart. And if we're getting a lot of those, maybe we should operate more like the linux kernel, which has a merge window of something like a week after a release before they start turning that into the next release - in which case we would do something like continue to merge changes into master all the time but create a new branch and start regressing it within a week or two of actually completing the previous release. Certainly, I don't think that we should wait more than a month before branching, since if we took a month, that would leave a month to get all of the regressions ironed out and still have a 2 month release cycle, and with how things have been going, I'm not sure that we'd even manage to do that in a month.

- Jonathan M Davis
August 19, 2014
On Mon, 18 Aug 2014 20:22:08 -0400
Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d-announce
<digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> Well, people will invent *any* excuse to pass over anything they don't feel like bothering with. It sounds like that's probably what they were doing.
not exactly, 'cause they *are* interested in using D, especially after i demonstrated some 'D power' and pointed 'em to the excellent Ali's book.


August 19, 2014
Hmm, list of bug fixes in dlang.org/changelog.html contains bugs that have been fixed but yet pushed into 2.066 branch.