• Mike Parker (165/165) Sep 06 2021 The D Language Foundation meeting for the month of August took
• Tejas (17/20) Sep 06 2021 Happy to see the meeting this month was fruitful as well, looking

Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:

The D Language Foundation meeting for the month of August took 
place on Friday, August 27, at 13:00 UTC. Participating were:

* Walter Bright
* Átila Neves
* Andrei Alexandrescu
* Ali Çehreli
* Razvan Nitu
* Max Haughton
* Me




One of the SAOC applications was on the agenda. The proposed 
project aims to solve an issue that arises with dub when two 
dependencies, in turn, depend on different versions of a third 
dependency. Currently, dub will error out. The proposal calls for 
two new compiler switches that dub can make use of to resolve the 
version difference by modifying the mangled names of the 
functions from two versions to distinguish them. As one of the 
SAOC judges, Átila liked the end goal of the project but was 
concerned about the approach. Walter also expressed concern about 
the ramifications of the new switches. He suggested exploring if 
dmd's existing `-mv` switch can be used to solve the problem. If 
that is not possible, the SAOC student will proceed with 
implementing the original proposal. Once the project is complete, 
it can be tested and evaluated to see if it works without any 
problematic consequences.


We talked about getting more active in [making use of our HR 
fund][1]. It's currently sitting at $17,525. We have one contract 
job that's indefinitely delayed, but it's been a while since we 
put this fund to use. As a start, I proposed paying someone to 
investigate the DLL situation, see what's still broken, and fix 
it. Someone pointed out that Martin Kinkelin has significantly 
improved DLL support for LDC in order to make Phobos/Druntime as 
a DLL a reality. So whether or not this particular initiative 
moves forward depends on if there's enough work left to do to 
fund it, and I'll know more once I get the details from Martin. 
If not, we'll have other funded projects to propose. (And if 
anyone is appreciative of the work Martin has done on this issue 
and with LDC in general, you can show it [by sponsoring his 
work][2].)


The services that comprise dlang.org are not all on one server, 
they are administered by different people and others generally 
have no admin access. This includes not just the servers, but the 
domains and DNS settings. This is a result of some of the 
services, such as the D Tour and the web forum interface, having 
been created and managed by volunteers, and subsequently brought 
under the dlang.org umbrella. At a previous meeting last year, we 
discussed the need to unify things somewhat. It would be 
beneficial to have multiple people with admin access to all of 
the services that comprise our core community.

Around the same time last year, an anonymous donor provided $500 
to the foundation to put to use on server management, and also 
offered his experience and expertise if we need it. We 
subsequently discussed options at a couple of meetings, but did 
not come to a final conclusion, and put the issue on the 
backburner. Recently, we received news that the long-term 
administrator of dlang.org is looking toward retirement not too 
far down the road. He gave us significantly advance notice so 
that we can make preparations with time to spare. Now is the time 
to take the issue off the backburner.

We decided as a first step to reach out to our anonymous donor 
since he already offered to help, to see if he is still willing. 
If so, we will consult with him and start formulating a plan. We 
may need to ask for volunteers or raise money for a part-time 
position, or who knows what. I will put out more information and 
announcements as we progress.


Razvan has been working on a system to track and reward 
contributions of Bugzilla fixes across the core repositories, 
with help from Vladimir Panteleev. He's got the implementation 
done and has successfully tested it, so now he's ready to pull 
the trigger on it. We discussed potential rewards for the first 
round. Razvan will soon publish a blog post describing the new 
system and detailing the rewards.

The short of it is that each reward period will run for three 
months. At the end of the period, the top three contributors will 
each be rewarded. Razvan will explain in the blog post how the 
scoring system works. Rewards will vary and will be announced at 
the beginning of each period. As a pilot run, the first period 
will be shorter, starting from the date Razvan announces in his 
blog post and ending on the first day of DConf Online (November 
20). That will allow us to announce the reward winners at DConf. 
The second period will be longer, starting from November 21 and 
running until March 31. The third period will then begin the 
quarterly schedule starting from April 1.


Two recent PRs from one of this year's SAOC participants, Luís 
Ferreira, made their way onto the agenda.

[He submitted one][3] back in July to implement [DIP 1029, "Add 
throw as Function Attribute"][4]. This is going to need sign-off 
from Walter. We discussed it at the meeting, and Walter promised 
to look at it as soon as I remind him. Luís isn't quite ready 
yet; he still has some more work to do and has asked me to wait 
until he's done. When I get the thumbs up from him, I'll ping 
Walter and he'll review the PR.

[The other was a fix][5] for [Bugzilla issue 19320][6]. This is 
an issue affecting unit testing `std.array`. His workaround 
involved modifying that module. Razvan subsequently submitted an 
[alternative PR that disables the error][7]. We discussed the 
issue and the PRs and decided the best course of action is to 
find and resolve the root cause in dmd. This is now on Walter's 
TODO list.


For some time now, Mathias Lang has quietly been working on a 
governance proposal for D inspired by [Python's PEP 13][8]. He 
has solicited feedback from a few people, including Iain Buclaw 
and myself, and now has a draft proposal. Max brought this up in 
the meeting and everyone agreed that it's worth discussing. We 
decided that this will be the primary item on the agenda for our 
next monthly meeting on September 24th. I subsequently asked 
Mathias to submit the proposal to all the relevant parties so 
they can review it beforehand.

I want to emphasize that this is going to be a *discussion* of 
the proposal. The last thing I want is to give the impression 
that this indicates an intention to accept or reject it outright. 
Experience has shown that people can read more into my words than 
I intended by them, so let me be clear: this is a *discussion* of 
the proposal, a discussion which can lead to any of a number of 
potential outcomes, none of which is preordained.

I will have more to say about this after our next monthly meeting.


Quite frequently, the topics that come up in our monthly meetings 
are lacking some perspective. Bringing some key people into these 
meetings can bring that needed perspective. As such, we've 
decided that starting with the next meeting, we will invite 
Martin Kinkelin, Iain Buclaw, and Mathias Lang to become 
permanent meeting members. Mathias has been attending the 
quarterly meetings as a representative of his company, Iain has 
attended as the representative of GDC, and Martin has recently 
begun attending as the representative of LDC. Including them in 
our monthly meetings can't help but be beneficial to D.


A few other topics we discussed: Ali brought up a hypothetical 
renaming of ` trusted` to something that would more accurately 
reflect its meaning (` certified` came up, but this is not 
something anyone will actively pursue at the moment); Walter 
brought up his implementation of bitfields for ImportC and 
proposed that he turn them on for D, and after a discussion about 
it everyone agreed that's the way to go; Andrei brought up [his 
old PR to add `imported` for inline imports][9], since the 
library solution has limitations a language solution would not, 
and it seems there was agreement to move forward with it.


Our next meeting is scheduled for September 24th. I expect the 
governance proposal will take up the majority of our discussion 
time, leaving little room for the potential items we already have 
for the agenda. In other words, it's full.

If you have an issue regarding the D community or the ecosystem 
that you would like to see on a meeting agenda, please let me 
know. I don't believe it's an option for the next meeting, but I 
can definitely slot you in at a future meeting. In addition to 
discussing your agenda, we would welcome your feedback on any of 
the issues we discuss at that meeting.


[1]: https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/NTUxOTc=
[2]: https://github.com/sponsors/kinke
[3]: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12934
[4]: 
https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/accepted/DIP1029.md
[5]: https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/8204
[6]: https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19320
[7]: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/13015
[8]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0013/
[9]: https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1756

Tejas <notrealemail gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 6 September 2021 at 11:17:53 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
 The D Language Foundation meeting for the month of August took 
 place on Friday, August 27, at 13:00 UTC. Participating were:

 [...]

Happy to see the meeting this month was fruitful as well, looking 
forward to the blog posts/anouncements :)

As a topic to bring up in a future meeting, could you please 
bring up DIP 1040? I talked to Max about it and he said that 
implementing it requires a backend change which needs Walter's 
help(I believe he said something about exceptions being 
problematic), but due to reasons, Walter hasn't been able to see 
to it.

Considering Walter's desire to make things easier for C/C++ to D 
translator developers(as seen by his initiative regarding 
`bitfield`), could you please bring up the topic of this DIP's 
implementation and/or the next iteration of the DIP's design for 
community review? It would be nice to see some progress visible 
on this front.

Thank you for all the work you and the other language maintainers 
do to make D better :D