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The primary goal for this planning session was to establish priority high-level goals for the D project. It lasted a little under an hour. The following people attended:
- Walter Bright
- Ali Çehreli
- Dennis Korpel
- Átila Neves
- Razvan Nitu
- Mike Parker
- Robert Schadek
The update
We discussed the feedback from the gripes and wishes campaign. Walter said he really likes it and thinks it's going to be very helpful for us. He plans to look for any low-hanging fruit in there that he can deal with immediately.
In the interest of not overextending ourselves, we decided to limit ourselves to three active goals. These are:
- stabilize the language/compiler/standard library
- enhance the ecosystem (improving tools, support for third-party libraries, etc.)
- strengthen the community (removing cruft from the website, updating outdated docs and tutorials, website redesign, etc.)
We agreed that we should have one or two people in charge of each goal. Their responsibilities will be to:
- have the final say on which projects and tasks should be added to the goal's task list now
- prioritize the task list
- assign projects and tasks
We also decided that we'll revisit our three goals in six months to determine if we should shift focus from one or more of them, or if we can handle any additional goals.
Our homework for the next week is for each of us to put together a list of projects and tasks that align with our current goals. At our next meeting, we'll establish who's in charge of each goal and start building out the lists.
What you can do
The gripes and wishes feedback is our primary source of project and task ideas, so those of you who participated have already contributed. We're going to set up projects on our GitHub Projects page for each of the goals so that you can see our current focus.
Until then, I invite everyone who has an interest to peruse the gripes and wishes feedback and come up with your own lists of priority projects and tasks. Email them to me (social@dlang.org), post about them in the forums, or DM them to me on Discord. We can use this additional feedback to help us establish the initial task lists.
What about the Vision Document?
The vision document was our well-intentioned but ultimately futile effort at a step toward project management. We got it written and published, but had no follow-through. Razvan and Dennis did employ it to help to some degree in their work, but ultimately our vision lacked vision.
Consider our current effort a reboot with an eye toward more focus and organization. The existing vision document is obsolete. I'm going to replace it with something inline with our what we're doing now. We can count that as a task under "strengthen the community".
