Here's looking at you, kid

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 11/14/2015 08:47 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, 2015-11-13 at 19:40 -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
> wrote:
>> […]
>>
>> that would be most appreciated!
>
> Or you could do it based on your material, no?

I take it there's a bit of sarcasm there, so probably it's worth trying 
a longer answer.

There's been a recurring matter in our community with delegating work. 
Some work can be done by several of our talented contributors, whereas 
some other work can only be tackled by a few core contributors.

Naturally, it stands to reason that Walter should be able to delegate 
non-Walter work and focus on Walter work. Same goes for me - I cannot 
delegate work such as the Foundation, conference travels, DConf 
sponsorship/strategy/PR, or writing articles; but I should be able to 
delegate things such as at least some of the work on reference counting, 
collections, fixing bugs found in the process, updating dconf.org, etc.

We've had moderate success at delegating work but it's been highly 
unpredictable whether any specific request could go through. This can 
get quite frustrating; for example, it is well acknowledged by the 
community that Phobos should not create garbage gratuitously. Seeing 
that nobody is actually doing it, Walter did a bunch of work on that, 
but his initiative has not been followed. Recently I also pitched in 
with "Under 1000 opened bugs for Phobos" and suggested that a simple 
pass through by us all could thin the list considerably to the much 
fewer bugs that are truly difficult. The response was non-null (thank 
you) but much smaller than it could have been.

This has been going on for a good while, and again my perception is 
there has been some progress. But by and large Walter has been hard at 
work on a mix of only-Walter and non-Walter problems, with the known 
negative effects on focus and effectiveness. So we agreed that Walter 
will focus on C++ exceptions and I'll save him of Foundation, 
refcounting, and DConf work.

In light of him being focused on getting C++ exceptions going, I think 
it's entirely appropriate that he suggests others to write the 
documentation.


Thanks,

Andrei