Setting our vision for the 2017 cycle

[petrochenkov]

@dikaiosune

Also as I've spent time gathering data on Rust progress and infrastructure for the dashboard (although it has admittedly been slow going lately), I've seen that there is a significant amount of time spent dealing with testing/CI/release infrastructure. The number of @bors retries always seems rather high to me, as does the number of failed nightlies many months (although this month seems not too bad).

I admit some bias here, but perhaps it is worth focusing organization and efforts to continue improving Rust's automation and allow stability without stagnation to move forward as quickly as possible? "Rust should increase the stability and utility of its infrastructure and automation." ?

By the way, does @edunham still work on the project? IIRC, she was hired to maintain the infrastructure, but I haven't seen any traces of her activity for months and all visible infrastructure work is still done by @alexcrichton and @brson.

This intersects with my next question, is any hiring planned to complete the listed tasks? It may be unrealistic, but I have a feeling that the project need at least few times more people working on it full time to achieve planned goals. People working on Rust as a hobby in their free time (like me ) are generally not very predictable / reliable and tend to do whatever is fun and whatever they like and not what is critical for the project.