On Saturday, 9 February 2013 at 22:30:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
D1 is no longer officially supported. There are a couple users of D1 still (like Don), and it would be discourteous to try to purge D1. The point of using git is that branches can exist and be amended if a reason comes up to do so.
I know, you've mentioned it as a side note on some dmd-internals/GitHub discussion.
Note that even though I would obviously love to see more corporate users contributing to D2, I'm not at all trying to discourage Don, Leandro and the others from Sociomantic from continuing to work on D1.
There just has not really been an official announcement regarding the ongoing D1 development, and what form it will continue in.
I don't see how anyone has been damaged or even inconvenienced here.
I think a lack of clear communication in this area can be a threat in two ways:
First, from how discussions in the different online fora usually go, the D development is not exactly perceived as principled or organized by many outsiders. And seemingly continuing to support a product after its firmly announced discontinuation date is only going to add to that, as Russel noted earlier.
Second, and perhaps even more importantly, such situations will almost invariably startle the developer community, as evidenced by the posts in this thread, and the (as usual, slightly ... direct) "wtf is Walter doing" messages that have been popping up on IRC lately.
I don't want to make it seem as if I knew it all and had the answer to all process-related questions; I certainly don't and there are many people here who are much more experienced in the various aspects of software development than I am. But I *do* think that I have recognized the vital importance of communication to the success of any big problem (open source or not). And, as I think I mentioned elsewhere recently, it occurs to me that a lack or delay in communication has been the recurring theme in many of the more unfortunate turns and missed opportunities in D's history.
In retrospect, some of my recent messages might have turned out a little bit too blunt. Please accept my apologies, I just tried to state my opinion clearly and did not intend to offend anybody. But I'd hate to see the same story being repeated all over again, and it seems that unfortunately it is the most direct queries that tend receive a response the fastest...
David
