On 1/6/11 11:47 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Mercurial on dsource.org …
Personally, I'd really like to persuade Walter, you, and whoever else actually decides this to consider hosting the main repository at an external place like GitHub or Mercurial, because DSource has been having some real troubles with stability, although it got slightly better again recently. The problem is somewhat alleviated when using a DVCS, but having availabilities the main source repositories is not quite the best form of advertisement for a language.
Additionally, the UI of GitHub supports the scenario where only a few people (or Walter alone) actually have commit/push access to the main repository really well through cheap forks which stay logically connected to he main repository and merge requests. The ability to make comments on specific (lines in) commits, also in combination with pull requests, is awesome as well.
I would also like to suggest Git over Mercurial, though this is mostly personal preference – it is used more widely, it has GitHub and Gitorious (I'm having a hard time finding Bitbucket comparable personally), it's proven to work well in settings where the main tree is managed by a single person (->Linux), it tries not artificially restricting you as much as possible (something I imagine Walter might like), … – but again, it's probably a matter of taste, I don't want to start a flamewar here.
The most important thing to me is, however, that I'd really like to see a general shift in the way D development is done towards more contributor-friendliness. I can only bow to Walter as a very capable and experienced compiler writer, but as it was discussed several times here on the list as well, in my opinion D has reached a point where it desperately needs to win new contributors to the whole ecosystem. There is a reason why other open source projects encourage you to write helpful commit messages, and yet we don't even have tags for releases (!) in the DMD repository.
I didn't intend to offend anybody at all, but I'd really hate to see D2 failing to »take off« for reasons like this…
David
