On 1/18/12 4:24 PM, Don Clugston wrote:
On 18 January 2012 22:48, Andrei Alexandrescu<[email protected]> wrote:
We must start somewhere, and with time the "de-aging" process will
accelerate. Without giving old bugs due process, we undermine people's
confidence that we're thorough and that every bug will be ultimately looked
at.
Do you have any evidence for that?
I do. Every so often people in forums mention "... and that issue is
opened since 2007 at critical level and with a patch too!"
One person who submitted a bunch of pertinent bug reports and patches
that stayed ignored for years became the most vocal D naysayer on reddit
and in IRC. The declared reason was precisely this - that there's
there's no due process for bugs that are important to some, even when
accompanied by patches and discussed repeatedly. That person alone did
very, very much damage to D's image in those forums.
I agree regressions are important. But we shouldn't frame things as "either
we look at older bugs or fix regressions". I think each release should pay
attention to both.
I do not agree. We CANNOT do everything. Anything we do diverts
attention from something else.
I don't see any reason for old bugs to be a high priority. Sure it's
nice, but so are a lot of other things.
Unless what I wrote above and below changes your opinion I think we've
reached irreducible positions in the matter.
It would be true if we'd reached a state where all the open bugs are
of roughly equal importance, (and roughly equal difficulty), but we're
still not there yet.
I think oldest bugs are of higher importance than randomly placed bugs.
More importantly, I think this attention is misplaced.
Organizationally, the attention needs to be on Phobos, which, in stark
contrast to DMD, has not noticeably benefited from the move to git.
Look at the changelogs. There are zillions of compiler fixes, and
practically nothing for Phobos.
Phobos is not moving. What can we do to improve the situation?
Working on Phobos (adding new features, libraries) has quite a different
dynamics from working on the compiler (fixing issues, bringing features
up to predefined spec). This makes it difficult to compare the two and
tenuous to drive conclusions from the comparison.
To answer the question at face value, I think we need more contributions
from people who have the time, talent, and willingness. Probably time is
the major lack in our ranks. We have a few things in the works - the new
json library, serialization, allocators, containers. Most importantly,
there are a few good examples of submissions and a good process in place.
Andrei
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