Under normal circumstances, I would have scheduled our August
meeting on Friday, August 5th, but as most of us were in London
for DConf, August 4th, the day of the Hackathon, was a perfect
day for it. So in the afternoon, those of us physically present
gathered in the space behind the DConf stage, with Iain joining
us remotely, and got down to business.
This was only the second opportunity we've had to hold one of
these meetings in person since we started them, the last being a
quarterly meeting at DConf 2019. We really enjoyed this one, and
we ended up in pockets of conversation that went on after the
meeting finished, which allowed for some participants to further
discuss topics that arose in the meeting, among other things. I'm
looking forward to our next chance for a face-to-face meeting.
## Particpants
Walter Bright
Iain Buclaw
Max Haughton
Dennis Korpel
Mathias Lang
Átila Neves
Robert Schadek
### Me
I opened by informing everyone that Robert will be joining all of
our monthly meetings going forward. He has been representing
Symmetry at our quarterly meetings (since the beginning, IIRC),
and I have brought him in to the monthly meetings now and again.
He told me during the conference that he was willing to join us
every month.
I then announced that I had nothing on the agenda, and I turned
the floor over to Iain.
### Iain
Iain started with an update on the merger of the dmd and druntime
repositories, saying that it had gone mostly well, and that he,
Mathias, Martin, and Vladimir had handled the problems that came
up. He said the main takeaway was that our build infrastructure
is a mess. There are too many makefiles and scripts all over the
place, many of which do the exact same thing. He thinks it would
be good to put them in a single repository that everything else
feeds off of, but anything is better than what we have now. Atila
agreed.
This led to a discussion about build.d vs. the makefiles. Max
noted that building dmd with `dmd -i` almost works, and there's
just one thing in the backend preventing it. Ultimately, we
decided that we need a someone to act as a build manager to focus
on streamlining our build system. Atila jokingly nominated Iain
for this, since he brought it up. (When I brought this up with
Iain in our September meeting, he had forgotten about it, but
agreed in principle to oversee a building system revamp. He and I
will discuss this more later.)
Next, Iain said the release scripts were the next things in his
sights. Martin Nowak had previously taken him through the process
of packaging a dmd release, but at this point there were two
things he didn't have: a valid code-signing certificate and
access to the S3 buckets for downloads.dlang.org. The
code-signing certificate we had from DigiCert was good for three
years, but had expired the year before, and now was causing
problems in signing the Windows release. EV code-signing certs
are expensive, and also have a 2FA dependency on a hardware
token. Guillaume pointed suggested OV certs in a subsequent forum
discussion, as they are cheaper and easier to use, but
unfortunately, Iain has since discovered that the situation is
set to change in a couple of months. Apparently, Microsoft's new
policy will result in some form of 2FA for all code-signing
certs, not just EV. I'm not at all versed on the details, or the
pros and cons, so I'll leave it to someone else to answer any
questions.
As for downloads.dlang.org, he noted that I had set up a
Backblaze account where we intended to transfer all of the files.
He and I also explained how we'll have free bandwidth with
Backblaze by using CloudFlare in front, as they are both part of
the Bandwidth Alliance. He also noted that docharchives.dlang.io
had been down for a while, and he was going to move it to a
Backblaze bucket. As I mentioned in [the summary of the July
meeting](https://forum.dlang.org/post/lxfildvecircypoab...@forum.dlang.org) that I published last week, he has since migrated the download files to Backblaze. Iain then clarified in a reply that downloads.dlang.org still goes to the S3 bucket for now, but that docarchives.dlang.io is operational again from a Backblaze bucket.
As for the releases, Iain plans to try and get an environment set
up through GitHub Actions in which anyone on the core team to
trigger the packaging of a release, so that we are no longer
reliant on one person to handle it.
### Dennis
Dennis had nothing for us at this meeting.
### Max
Max said he had nothing either, but Walter asked about his 80-bit
floating point emulation work. Max said he had implemented
multiplication and addition without correct rounding. Walter
suggested he look at Walter's half-float implementation for
inspiration. Max thought he should consult Knuth, but Walter
thinks that's not necessary if he uses the half-float
implementation as a reference. But they both agreed there's not a
lot of information
