On Saturday, 16 February 2013 at 17:10:33 UTC, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
With the recent talk about Orbit, I thought it is time to also
announce
the package manager that we have been working out based on the
simple
VPM system that has always been in vibe.d. I don't really like
stepping
into competition with Jacob here (*), but the approach is
different
enough that I think it should be put on the table.
Some may already have noticed it as it's mentioned already on
the vibe.d
website and is currently hosted on the same domain as the old
VPM registry:
http://registry.vibed.org/
DUB has two important development goals:
- Simplicity:
Making a DUB package, as well as using one as a dependency
should be
as simple as possible to facilitate broad usage, also and
especially
among language newcomers. Procedural build scripts often
scare away
people, although their added complexity doesn't matter for
bigger
projects. I think they should be left as an option rather
than the
default.
Turning a library/application into a DUB package can be as
simple as
adding a package.json file with the following content
(mysql-native
is automatically made available during the build in this
example):
{
"name": "my-library",
"dependencies": {"mysql-native": ">=0.0.7"}
}
If the project is hosted on GitHub, it can be directly
registered on
the registry site and is then available for anyone to use as
a
dependency. Alternatively, it is also possible to use a local
directory as the source for a particular package (e.g. for
closed
source projects or when working on both the main project and
the
dependency at the same time).
- Full IDE support:
Rather than focusing on performing the build by itself or
tying a
package to a particular build tool, DUB translates a general
build receipt to any supported project format (it can also
build
by itself). Right now VisualD and MonoD are supported as
targets and
rdmd is used for simple command line builds. Especially the
IDE
support is really important to not simply lock out people
who prefer
them.
Apart from that we have tried to be as flexible as possible
regarding
the way people can organize their projects (although by default
it
assumes source code to be in "source/" and string imports in
"views/",
if those folders exist).
There are still a number of missing features, but apart from
those it is
fully usable and tested on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
GitHub repository:
https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/dub
https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/dub-registry
Preliminary package format documentation:
http://registry.vibed.org/package-format
(*) Originally I looked into using Orbit as the package manager
for
vibe.d packages, but it just wasn't far enough at the time and
had some
traits that I wasn't fully comfortable with.
So I'm sorry if that appears completely stupid, but . . .
DUB sounds kind of like dumb. As Orbit sounds very nice,
especially since libraries are satellites of mars, so it make
sense to see other libs as artificial satellites :D
That is very poor, and have nothing to do with the actual
capabilities of each of them.
BTW, it's be great is we could avoid some king of phobos/tango
split on that subject and settle on one package manager.
