On Wednesday, 22 May 2013 at 13:38:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
At a level it should be obvious that not all breakages are
equal. It's better to suffer from few and well-motivated
breakages that actually fix real problems and improve user
code, than from arbitrary breakages caused by name churn. To
just put them under the same umbrella "this release broke my
build" would miss important details.
This is _exactly_ the mindset I am trying to fight with. I have
had an unpleasant experience of working in typical enterprise
environment for few years and there is quite a strong attitude
about this - no one cares about reasons for code breakage. For
those who care about breakage, it is a boolean flag - either
breaks, or not.
Contrary to this, there are plenty of people ( I am sure you know
lot of them at least from this newsgroup ;) ) who can accept any
breaking change for a greater good if reasonable tool to deal
with it is provided.
I don't believe it is the case where you can both eat the cookie
and have it.
Of course it is a problem. There have been numerous discussions
on the topic indeed, and we are evidently trying to improve
things.
I don't see those evidences. That is the issue. We keep speaking
on newsgroup about how important stability is, keep rejecting
proposal because of this and keep releasing dmd that breaks
stuff. The very next one will do it again - we both were
participating in that mail list thread after all.
There are some good improvements in details (like "-transition"
switch Kenji has implemented), but overall attitude does not seem
to change.
I only count one discussion initiated by you ("Release process
and backwards compatibility" started on March 8, 2013 at
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected].
That discussion has had some 15 responses from 7 people, none
of whom seemed to quite rally behind your point. I am sorry you
feel that particular idea has not received the attention you
believe it deserves, but it would be much to accuse me or
Walter of deliberately ignoring it.
I am very sorry if it sounds offensively, but not leaving a
single comment in a thread that essentially is created to ask
language authors their opinion about development/release process
is quite the same as ignoring. If you wanted more opinions about
it, you could have just mentioned it. No one can make this call
but you.
