On Thursday, 28 November 2013 at 02:54:27 UTC, Luís Marques wrote:
(context: homebrew is a very nice package installer for OS X.
It is, IMO, the easiest way to install dmd and related
utilities in OS X, and should probably be mentioned/recommended
in the downloads page)
Is anyone here proficient with homebrew formulas? The current
formula for DMD is only able to install the binaries (which is
not very usual for homebrew, AFAIK). Being able to install from
sources (--build-from-source) would be nice, not just to
support --devel (e.g., the beta versions, which could also be
supplied as binaries) but also --HEAD, which would build the
git master branch.
Adding support for those options is important, because they
allow one to:
- easily install and uninstall the beta versions, and quickly
change between several versions (they are cached). These betas
tend to not see as much field testing as one/Walter would like
before they become a non-beta release, so this would help.
Adding a tag like "latest-beta" to the git repo would allow one
to build from sources the latest beta, even if the homebrew
formula was out of date (e.g., it did not specify the latest
beta binaries, or a specific beta version tag, like
v2.064beta4).
- easily install the git head version. Homebrew makes this much
easier than following the instruction at
http://wiki.dlang.org/Building_DMD#Posix, by cloning the repo
automatically, building the binaries/libs (which would be fat
binaries, unlike the wiki instructions), installing, creating
dmd.conf, etc. Support for this option would make evaluating
dmd/phobos/druntime bugs much easier ("does it still reproduce
in git head?"). You can also access the cloned repo and do your
changes from there, so it lowers the barrier to casual
contributions even more.
So, is anyone here proficient with homebrew formulas? Anyone
willing to take this task? If no one volunteers, I'll try to do
it when I find the time, but I'm not very proficient with
homebrew formulas/Ruby, and homebrew's documentation has always
been lacking, IMO. So, if someone is comfortable with homebrew
your help would be very welcome.
Well, I was actually thinking about creating them at some point,
because currently I just have a small bash script that updates my
local repos, builds and installs using the posix makefile, then
makes a couple of changes to the default dmd.conf, due to the
fact I'm using the posix makefile, and using homebrew to do that
would be a lot easier for most.
