[Vala] [Genie] Print enhancements and handling of null

[Al Thomas <astavale yahoo co uk>]

This is using two Genie bugs as examples to try and find out how the Genie "community" handle triage, 
documentation and enhancements.
The two more bugs are "print statement with no arguments does not compile" ( 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688016 ) and "Print statement does not print newline if it has a 
null argument" (
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690127 )


Print statement with no arguments does not compile
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a request that to print a blank line just print can be used, instead of print "". This would be like 
Python 2, although with Python 3 and print now being a function simply typing 'print' returns a statement 
that it is a built in function.

Personally I don't mind if print with no value just prints a blank line instead of returning a compile error. 
The question is who agrees this change? It is reasonable to have the print statement expect something to 
print so this is probably more an enhancement than a bug. Is there a Genie benevolent dictator such as with 
Python or can only a community consensus be agreed for a change to be accepted? How is the acceptance then 
recorded - presumably in bugzilla?


Once the change is agreed, who is assigned the task of fixing it? In this instance because it is a fairly 
trivial change I think it should be assigned to the raiser, but what if they are not capable of delving into 
the Vala source code for Genie to fix this? Should this instead be closed as a good idea, but with limited 
resources there was no-one to take on the task?

Once a patch is received in bugzilla how is it reviewed and applied? There is at least one bug ( 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633083 ) which has a patch that has not been applied.


Print statement does not print newline if it has a null argument
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I tried to generate some nulls and it made me come across what may be seen as a different bug.

    var test = new array of int [5]
    for var item in test
        print item.to_string()


prints all zeros. 


    var test = new array of string [5]
    for var item in test
        print item

prints all nulls. Would it be better to have this as all empty strings? There is a desire to avoid nulls, for 
example see https://wiki.gnome.org/Genie#Nullable_Types and 
https://wiki.gnome.org/Vala/Tutorial#Strict_Non-Null_Mode. Would a new array of strings with empty strings 
solve the use case the bug reporter was having problems with? If so then can this bug be closed as nulls are 
ugly so they should probably print ugly! and open a new bug that new array of string [x] should be empty 
strings not nulls. Otherwise I can't think of any problem with having print null print with a newline, so it 
leads so the same set of questions as the analysis above.

Thoughts?

Al