On 1/7/13 7:47 AM, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
I can write a roadmap, but then, nobody will listen to me.
Walter can write a roadmap, nobody will listen to him.
One thing that few people know is that Walter and I have tried to kindly
convince people to work on specific things we believed were important.
Such attempts have been largely unsuccessful.
The reality is,
Walter is the "leader" and who decides what gets in and what not. It happened
to me before to implement stuff that doesn't get in. And that's fine. But
Walter, as a "leader" have to step up and tell where he wants to move so people
focus on the stuff that have a chance to be merged.
Otherwise the only road is forking, as it happened before. I don't think the
Tango split and now Amber are coincidences. There is a lack of leadership in D,
and talking with the community. Andrei tried to fill that leader position in
the past, and even when I have lots of differences with Andrei, I think he
successfully done that with Phobos. But he can't do that with DMD.
I agree that Walter doesn't have to do all, but at least he must be convinced
there is a value in it, and encourage it and help whoever wants to step up.
I, too, think there is value in this approach.
Why
would I bother to do anything if is very likely that Walter don't want to go
that direction and all my work was done for nothing? Been there before. Now I'm
more cautious when selecting my battles.
One thing I want to do is enshrine a vetting mechanism that would allow
Walter and myself to "pre-approve" enhancement requests. Someone
(including us) would submit an enhancement request to Bugzilla, and then
Walter and I add the tag "preapproved" to it. That means an
implementation of the request has our approval assuming it has the
appropriate quality.
That should reduce the cognitive load ("am I working for nothing over
here?") on the proponent of the feature and would also motivate the
proponent to define the feature with reasonable completeness before
implementing it.
Does anyone know of any mechanism for getting people to do what needs to be
done vs what they want to do that doesn't involve paying them? The only long
term successes I can point to all involve companies.
I do think that D to take the next leap needs to have more (directly or
indirectly) payed development. But still that doesn't stop you from having a
plan, a tentative roadmap.
I agree, and I happen to disagree with Walter's "Fog of War" theory
which I consider somewhat a rationalization of the simple fact he
enjoys, like we all do, working under the haphazard of creative flow.
Short- and medium-range plans do make sense for us, and we should put
them together. Important stuff keeps on remaining not done because at
the end of each release cycle we don't have a clear notion of what to
work on next.
Andrei
