• Mike Parker (181/181) Sep 05 2022 Under normal circumstances, I would have scheduled our August
• ryuukk_ (8/10) Sep 05 2022 D is an established open source project known by everyone in the
• ryuukk_ (2/5) Sep 05 2022 You linked the wrong DIP, your link point to DIP1043
• Mike Parker (3/8) Sep 05 2022 Sorry for that.
• StarCanopy (3/4) Sep 05 2022 Thanks for the roundup! It's exciting to see dub being worked on

Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:

Under normal circumstances, I would have scheduled our August 
meeting on Friday, August 5th, but as most of us were in London 
for DConf, August 4th, the day of the Hackathon, was a perfect 
day for it. So in the afternoon, those of us physically present 
gathered in the space behind the DConf stage, with Iain joining 
us remotely, and got down to business.

This was only the second opportunity we've had to hold one of 
these meetings in person since we started them, the last being a 
quarterly meeting at DConf 2019. We really enjoyed this one, and 
we ended up in pockets of conversation that went on after the 
meeting finished, which allowed for some participants to further 
discuss topics that arose in the meeting, among other things. I'm 
looking forward to our next chance for a face-to-face meeting.



Walter Bright
Iain Buclaw
Max Haughton
Dennis Korpel
Mathias Lang
Átila Neves
Robert Schadek


I opened by informing everyone that Robert will be joining all of 
our monthly meetings going forward. He has been representing 
Symmetry at our quarterly meetings (since the beginning, IIRC), 
and I have brought him in to the monthly meetings now and again. 
He told me during the conference that he was willing to join us 
every month.

I then announced that I had nothing  on the agenda, and I turned 
the floor over to Iain.


Iain started with an update on the merger of the dmd and druntime 
repositories, saying that it had gone mostly well, and that he, 
Mathias, Martin, and Vladimir had handled the problems that came 
up. He said the main takeaway was that our build infrastructure 
is a mess. There are too many makefiles and scripts all over the 
place, many of which do the exact same thing. He thinks it would 
be good to put them in a single repository that everything else 
feeds off of, but anything is better than what we have now. Atila 
agreed.

This led to a discussion about build.d vs. the makefiles. Max 
noted that building dmd with `dmd -i` almost works, and there's 
just one thing in the backend preventing it. Ultimately, we 
decided that we need a someone to act as a build manager to focus 
on streamlining our build system. Atila jokingly nominated Iain 
for this, since he brought it up. (When I brought this up with 
Iain in our September meeting, he had forgotten about it, but 
agreed in principle to oversee a building system revamp. He and I 
will discuss this more later.)

Next, Iain said the release scripts were the next things in his 
sights. Martin Nowak had previously taken him through the process 
of packaging a dmd release, but at this point there were two 
things he didn't have: a valid code-signing certificate and 
access to the S3 buckets for downloads.dlang.org. The 
code-signing certificate we had from DigiCert was good for three 
years, but had expired the year before, and now was causing 
problems in signing the Windows release. EV code-signing certs 
are expensive, and also have a 2FA dependency on a hardware 
token. Guillaume pointed suggested OV certs in a subsequent forum 
discussion, as they are cheaper and easier to use, but 
unfortunately, Iain has since discovered that the situation is 
set to change in a couple of months. Apparently, Microsoft's new 
policy will result in some form of 2FA for all code-signing 
certs, not just EV. I'm not at all versed on the details, or the 
pros and cons, so I'll leave it to someone else to answer any 
questions.

As for downloads.dlang.org, he noted that I had set up a 
Backblaze account where we intended to transfer all of the files. 
He and I also explained how we'll have free bandwidth with 
Backblaze by using CloudFlare in front, as they are both part of 
the Bandwidth Alliance. He also noted that docharchives.dlang.io 
had been down for a while, and he was going to move it to a 
Backblaze bucket. As I mentioned in [the summary of the July 
meeting](https://forum.dlang.org/post/lxfildvecircypoabain forum.dlang.org)
that I published last week, he has since migrated the download files to
Backblaze. Iain then clarified in a reply that downloads.dlang.org still goes
to the S3 bucket for now, but that docarchives.dlang.io is operational again
from a Backblaze bucket.

As for the releases, Iain plans to try and get an environment set 
up through GitHub Actions in which anyone on the core team to 
trigger the packaging of a release, so that we are no longer 
reliant on one person to handle it.


Dennis had nothing for us at this meeting.


Max said he had nothing either, but Walter asked about his 80-bit 
floating point emulation work. Max said he had implemented 
multiplication and addition without correct rounding. Walter 
suggested he look at Walter's half-float implementation for 
inspiration. Max thought he should consult Knuth, but Walter 
thinks that's not necessary if he uses the half-float 
implementation as a reference. But they both agreed there's not a 
lot of information available on the topic.

I mentioned to Max that I had spoken to Eyal Lotem of Weka about 
the move constructor DIP ([DIP 1040, "Copying, Moving, and 
Forwarding"](https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/DIP1043.md), for
which Max is the POC). Eyal told me this is the last big problem Weka has, so I
asked him to review the DIP and provide us with some feedback before I move it
to the next review round. Max said he had also spoken with Eyal and was
particularly interested in Weka's thoughts on the semantics involving "last
use". I had intended to email Eyal about this later, but I didn't get around to
it until I started writing this summary.

Max then remembered something he'd wanted to mention: people are 
using [the Dicsussions page in the dmd 
repository](https://github.com/dlang/dmd/discussions) to report 
dmd bugs. He suggested this shows that there's no argument for 
using Bugzilla. Robert concurred, and then launched into his 
turn...


Robert updated us on the current state of his scripts for 
migrating Bugzilla issues to GitHub. He believed he had found 
everybody who has both Bugzilla and GitHub accounts, and all that 
remained there was to ` ` tag them. He wanted to find a way to do 
it without spamming everyone with GitHub notifications. He 
believed the way to do that was to have the issues private during 
the move, then make them public after. He would have to put the 
script on a VM and let it run, as GitHub limits how many issues 
can be created in an hour, then requires a period of sleep. He 
would need an admin to create keys for him to use with the GitHub 
repositories, then he could pull the trigger when he's ready.

He them said that once all of the issues are migrated, we should 
activate the GitHub's project planner with a focus on identifying 
issues that new contributors can handle and that we should try to 
respond quickly to their PRs, and do what we can to onboard them. 
He noted how he is a contributor today because he was able to get 
a few commits into a core repository early on and was motivated 
to keep going, so we should do everything we can to ease the 
entry process for new contributors. There was some more 
discussion about this, but in the end it's going to be in the 
hands of the PR Managers (Razvan and Dennis).

Mathias noted how most of the issues on Bugzilla are for dmd. He 
suggested the phobos should be the first project to have the 
issues migrated. Robert said he's been using Phobos as a test 
case, so once it's where he'll be starting anyway.

Mathias then asked how Robert handled categorization (for 
example, the "x86" category on Bugzilla). Robert said part of the 
program looks at all the Bugzilla categories and sorts them into 
different color-coded GitHub labels. Mathias said he had also 
done some work on equivalent GitHub labels and they're already in 
the GitHub organization. They agreed to get together later to 
finalize a list of labels, though they did briefly delve into 
some of the details here.


Atila hadn't been aware of all the work that had recently been 
going into dub (mostly from Mathias and Jan Jurzitza, a.k.a. 
Webfreak). He was happy to hear about it, but slightly annoyed 
that he hadn't known. Other than that, he had nothing for us.

This led to a tangential discussion about new ways to recognize 
and reward contributors. I won't summarize that here, but it's 
something we're looking at.


Mathias asked Walter if he could make a breaking change to 
`Throwable`. That class has an internal interface, `TraceInfo`, 
which has two `opApply` implementations. Both of them take 
intended to take `char` arrays to generate text output, but 
Mathias said that's not ideal. Internally, DRuntime has a struct 
that contains more info, and it would be better to provide the 
user with this struct rather than a string. The user can then 
format the output however they want it.

The problem is that changing the interface is a breaking change. 
Most D users probably don't even know the interface exists, and 
if they do they probably aren't using it. If anyone is using it 
though, it would be Weka. So if he talked to Weka and got the 
thumbs up from them, would the change be allowed? Walter and 
Atila both saw no problem with it.


Walter brought up the idea of having a forum page for each page 
of the documentation, something Paul from Ucora had brought up in 
the forums and that we had discussed in our quarterly meeting in 
July. It seems the idea had stuck in his mind.

Now that he had ImportC working well, he wanted to spend some 
time knocking out DIP 1000 issues. This would be his priority for 
now. This led to discussion of some issues Atila and Dennis had 
found. Atila still needed to reduce his, but the one Dennis 
referenced was already in Bugzilla.

 From here we wandered off into a discussion of random topics such 
as the benefit of having an in-person meeting, speculation about 
next year's DConf, the coronavirus, and more. There was a bit of 
technical topics discussed, but nothing that needs coverage here. 
In otherwords, I didn't ever "gavel" the meeting closed as I 
usually do in our virtual meetings, but we were done. And we 
enjoyed hanging out a while longer before we wandered off to the 
main room.


For the second time in a row, I'm publishing a meeting summary 
after the next meeting has already taken place. It was a regular 
monthly meeting that we held at 14:00 UTC on September 2. I 
expect to be back on track with this one, so you should see a 
summary for it published in the last week of this month. The next 
meeting as I write is a quarterly meeting which we should be 
having on October 7 at 14:00 UTC.

ryuukk_ <ryuukk.dev gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 5 September 2022 at 11:39:44 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
 EV code-signing certs are expensive, and also have a 2FA 
 dependency on a hardware token

D is an established open source project known by everyone in the 
planet

I'm pretty sure contacting one company to get sponsor for 1 would 
work, have you tried that?

No need to pay the expensive price, money should be spent on 
human resources for the language, not on that kind of stuff, if 
possible of course

ryuukk_ <ryuukk.dev gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 5 September 2022 at 11:39:44 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
 I mentioned to Max that I had spoken to Eyal Lotem of Weka 
 about the move constructor DIP (DIP 1040, "Copying, Moving, and 
 Forwarding",

You linked the wrong DIP, your link point to DIP1043

Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 5 September 2022 at 13:53:42 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:
 On Monday, 5 September 2022 at 11:39:44 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
 I mentioned to Max that I had spoken to Eyal Lotem of Weka 
 about the move constructor DIP (DIP 1040, "Copying, Moving, 
 and Forwarding",

 You linked the wrong DIP, your link point to DIP1043

Sorry for that.

https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/DIP1040.md

StarCanopy <starcanopy protonmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 5 September 2022 at 11:39:44 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
 [...]

Thanks for the roundup! It's exciting to see dub being worked on 
more actively. Even the superficial changes are nice.