Re: [Vala] The future of Vala

["Matthias Berndt" <Matthias_Berndt gmx de>]

Hey Al,

> Hmm, that seems a little unfair. You submitted the patch on the 08 Aug 2016 and it was reviewed on the 10 
> Aug 2016. Unfortunately your first version of the patch included a bug that the review identified.
Well, I fixed that bug within a day. Then it took another 12 days for Jürg to ask another question, which I 
responded to within 15 Minutes. Then it took another 3 weeks for Jürg to respond to that. Now, I totally 
sympathise with Jürg, most people don't have as much time to work on their leisure projects as they would 
like. But please put yourself in my shoes as somebody who's trying to get his feet wet hacking on the Vala 
compiler. I mean, this is not a rewrite-the-world patch, the actual patch is -12/+7 lines. If that takes, 
say, six weeks to get merged, how long will it take to get a sufficient number of patches merged to build 
enough trust to get commit access? How long will it take to get a new feature merged, one that might be a 
couple hundred lines long or something? Again, I sympathise with Jürg and his lack of time. But nevertheless 
these long response times do not send the right signals to new compiler hackers.

> I would accept there is a communication failure of the Vala release cycle, but I think there is a far more 
> favourable interpretation of the decision not to merge the patch at the current time. 
>
>
> Vala is a GNOME core project and currently follows the GNOME release cycle. See 
> https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointTwentyoneA hard code freeze started on the 12 Sep 2016 and you will see 
> Vala 0.33.1 was tagged on that day. Including a version of Vala with GNOME 3.22.0 that cannot build some 
> packages just isn't going to happen. I would say that is why your patch wasn't merged at the time.
OK, I didn't understand that. I'm happy that it now looks as though the patch will be merged soonishly.

> BTW, thank you for your work on Vala. It looks like you have four patches in this next release. For anyone 
> else who wants to see what Mattias's work has improved in the type system of Vala's internals see:
>
> https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/log/?qt=author&q=matthias%20berndt
Perhaps you're right, maybe I should just be happy about the two bugfixes I already got merged :-)

Cheers,
Matthias