On 03.01.2013 09:33, David Nadlinger wrote:
Sorry for being a bit blunt, but: What advantages would this provide over just using the package management facilities of one's favorite distro? Keep in mind: http://xkcd.com/927/ ;)
If you want to distribute your software or library to multiple distros or OSes, you would only need to learn how to work with a future dpm instead of learning the packaging system of all your different supported distributions. And the competing standards should not be a problem if the community decides to endorse on particular way of doing things (provided it's compatible with other approaches).
The biggest problem one faces when trying to package D libraries right now is that the different D compilers (DMD, GDC, LDC), but also multiple versions of the _same_ compiler, are not binary compatible to each other. So, if you don't want to use a build tool like rdmd to build *everything* from scratch each time, you need to manage multiple binaries around for any given library, one for each compiler version. As it is actually quite common to have multiple D compiler versions installed side-by-side – e.g. DMD for fast iteration and GDC/LDC for release builds, or transitioning one's projects one by one to a new DMD version after the release – I think that any design which doesn't address this issue isn't worth the effort over just using an existing solution.
Doesn't this mean a D package manager is needed to deal with this problem? -- Marco Nembrini
