+1
On Thursday, 21 June 2012 at 07:40:35 UTC, bearophile wrote:
For DMD in GitHub there are more than one hundred open pull
requests (currently 111). So far people have created more than
one thousand patches for DMD (currently 1022):
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pulls
Among the list of open pull requests there are some bugs and
enhancement requests that I'd really like to see applied &
fixed in not too much time.
I am not a compiler writer, but I have two suggestions for
Walter (or at least to open a discussion, if the things I am
saying are wrong):
1) Currently the patches that Walter applies written by other
people come mostly from the most recent ones. So the list of
the open pull requests is managed almost as a stack (last in -
fist out). I think this is not good.
I suggest to do the opposite, this means to manage that list
more like a queue (first in - first out), so I suggest Walter
to look for patches to apply starting from the oldest ones.
This has the advantage that the patches don't get too much old,
so they rot less.
An additional strategy to choose what patches to apply is to
choose first the ones that fix bugs that are most significant.
Bugs are not all equal, many bugs don't cause significant
problems, while others are quite annoying. Significant bugs
often are fixed by small patches. I see lot of not so
significant patches applied, while I see patches that fix bugs
that I hit every other day sleep in that list for weeks or
months. If you want I will list some significant patches
currently open.
2) I suggest Walter to increase a little more the openness of
the way the front-end is developed. There are many kinds of
compiler patches:
- Simple localized change;
- Complex localized change;
- Widespread trivial changes;
- Widespread complex changes;
- Back-end changes Vs front-end changes;
- That fixes a well defined and localized bug;
- That introduces a new feature, or a small part of a new
feature.
The harder patches are better left to Walter, but I suggest
Walter to eventually let few other people merge the simpler
patches, after a review by one or two more persons.
In large projects, with skilled helper people, the leader
eventually must learn to trust other people and to delegate
some of the work, building a pyramid of trust. I think that if
Hara writes a simple 5-lines long patch for the DMD front-end,
and Don or someone else equally skilled reviews and accepts
that patch, there is no need for Walter to merge that little
patch himself.
Bye,
bearophile
