On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 19:11:39 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 7/9/14, 12:21 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
Vladimir's talk on Dustmite is now up on Reddit. We ship
Dustmite as
part of the dmd distribution.
But it's a secret.
Just try to find out anything or any mention of Dustmite on
dlang.org.
The idea "Build It, and They Will Come" is a stupid hollywood
myth. We
cannot go on with creating fantastic, revolutionary tools and
then keep
them a secret.
Dustmite is just one example of this, but it's on top of my
head because
I went looking for a link to it to go with the Reddit pointer
to the
video. It fits in quite nicely with my previous antics at
discovering
there were no links to gdc or ldc instructions, and no mention
anywhere
that to get gdc on Ubuntu, one only needs to type:
sudo apt-get install gdc
All you guys building stuff - it's all WASTED EFFORT if you
don't make
it findable by users. /rant
This post underlines a few of my frustrations as well, which
I'll share with the intent of producing a positive effect.
There are a few things each and any of us can do, starting with
the simplest and utmost trivial, to help D succeed (which is I
assume the shared goal of all of our regular participants).
* Shed the provincialism. The implied provincialism in this
forum - which is but a microcosm - is staggering. There's a
good fight of ideas and thousands of hours cumulatively spent
on writing posts, often with great technical content. There
seems to be no understanding that statistically nobody in the
larger community lurks here; nobody peruses the forum to get
the pulse of language development; nobody comes here to read
technical pieces about D. The forum activity should be planning
followed by "going out" and doing things.
The simplest thing do for each and every member of this
community is to have accounts on all social news sites
(twitter, facebook, reddit, hackernews) and discuss _there_
things instead of replying to announcements internally. I
recall some of us haven't even brought themselves to check
digitalmars.D.announce although they are active on
digitalmars.D - this is crazy!
It has often been the case that Walter and I (again!) hold the
fort on public discussions on D, while most of the others
discuss the same topics on the forums.
* Get on pull requests. I can't say this much enough. If you
wrote some, ping about it. If you see some you care about,
review it even if you don't have rights yet. A simple message
such as "I reviewed this and LGTM, any holdup?" would be
sufficient to attract attention.
If you feel experienced enough, ask to be included as a
committer. (I plan to lower the bar on committer acceptance;
with git it's easy to undo mistakes and we should exercise due
process on firing, not accepting, committers.)
* Steal work. Whenever there's something obviously good to be
done, don't expect Walter or me to do it. Don't suggest. Don't
dispense advice (especially of the management drone kind -
seriously, STFU). Just do it. There's just a FRACKTON of simple
and obviously good work to be done here. Get on it.
Andrei
I added a "Review pull requests" section in the "Get involved"
page at DWiki. Please use some time otherwise spent on frustrated
forum posts and improve it (considering my contributions to
Phobos are minimal, there's probably some bullshit/missing
obvious stuff)
The "Get Involved" page:
http://wiki.dlang.org/Get_involved
Edit the "Review pull requests" section:
http://wiki.dlang.org/?title=Get_involved&action=edit§ion=5
