How could you be sure that after long lonely work the proposal
is worth
inclusion?
No need to be lonely. You can (and should) have community
projects on
dub. The dub repository is a distribution mechanism, if you
want community
contribution to a library advertise as such and git er done.
With git.
Until done.
If it's worth inclusion in phobos, it will rise to the top.
I admire idealists, but in the past few years how many
independent projects have been adopted by phobos? Is it the case
that none of those that were not are essentially at core unworthy
of adoption, or is it that they need some polishing to be of more
general use and doing so simply doesn't appeal to the library
author, whilst others with the skills are less inclined to help
on a private project? I don't know the answer, but obviously
have a tentative assessment.
Since there is so much hidden gold in dub, I wonder if it makes
sense to ask notable library authors how they might feel about
adoption of parts of their work into Mars. What does Adam Ruppe
think, for example?
Maybe I'm wrong but there is a big controversy and
fragmentation e.g. in
database and gui domain.
So don't start with databases and guis. And at least down the
line consider the possibility that there might not be just one
option when the needs of the problem domains may be very
different in spite of apparent superficial technical similarity.
Moving things towards phobos won't help with fragmentation,
will just piss
those off who disagree. Better path is to put solutions in dub
for people
to use and abuse, see if one becomes dominant. Only then look
at moving to
phobos.
If Mars doesn't accomplish its goals then people won't use it and
all that will have happened is a little wasted effort - but one
doesn't learn without experimentation, including in the social
domain. It just hasn't happened that people mystically converge
on a solution just because it is in dub, polish the code and
write documentation for somebody else's code base - possibly
because someone needs to lead the effort.
This may lead to competing packages. How would we decide what
are the
"proper" packages.
One might start with exploring what is already out there and
seeing which authors are agreeable to having their work adopted.
Making decisions isn't easy in life, and people are going to
criticize you because not everyone will be happy with the outcome
- but that isn't a reason not to do something if it is worth
doing.
I like the idea of having a 'recommended' section in dub, for
those things
considered by the community to be good.
This is a start, but doesn't address the problem that to be
useful to a broad audience one needs much more than raw code and
that the library author may not want to or be good at doing these
other things.
In response to Craig:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
A democratic book for a democratic age. But there is an
extensive literature on the weaknesses of making decisions in
this manner, and one certainly won't achieve excellence that way.
(See Peter Thiel, Linus, Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, etc).
