On Tuesday, 25 February 2014 at 01:21:03 UTC, Assaf Gordon wrote:
1.
Packaging for source-based distribution (ie a "tarball"):
I couldn't find a working autotools template (only few old
discussions),
and so far it seems the best way is writing my own makefile
(which I have).
My concern is that the parameters are so different between
dmd/gdc/ldc that I basically force the users to choose one.
GDC and LDC have gdmd/ldmd respectively, which wrap DMD-style
command line arguments over the GCC/Clang-style arguments that
`gdc` and `ldc` accept.
I'm also not sure whether it will work on windows or not (I'm
developing on linux). For windows users, would a
custom,hand-written make file just work?
That depends almost entirely on the shell commands used in the
target recipes. Also, it's easy to create reliance on a certain
flavour of `make`, such as by using GNU-make-specific features;
it's not a big problem though because GNU make is relatively easy
to get on Windows through MinGW.
Although "rdmd" is terrific, I would really prefer not to
require it (since it is 'dmd' specific and not free in the FOSS
sense).
`rdmd` itself should be free software, and supports `gdmd` and
`ldmd` through the --compiler flag.
DMD itself is indeed not entirely free software.
2.
How complicated it for potential users of the program to
install a D compiler?
Based on my humble experience:
dmd: fine, as long as the downloadable binary version works. I
tested only on multiple debians and ubuntus. But it's not free,
and it requires root privileges.
gdc: only source code available, compiling is a bit tricky.
After compilation, it works.
ldc: the pre-compiled version doesn't work on old Ubuntu (10.4)
or new Debian (7). The source code version is messy to compile
and I stopped after couple of tries.
So, it seems, that if a random person (not unix expert) wants
to compiler my program, he/she will not have an easy time doing
so.
Maybe we should have a generic Linux binary package that
statically links all dependencies, which would then be usable on
a wide variety of Linux systems without requiring root privileges.
But are there really no packages of `gdc` and `ldc` in various
package repositories? I haven't used D on Linux in a while, but I
find that hard to believe.
3.
Distributing Binaries:
Since I already assume source distribution is not friendly, I
consider also making the pre-compiled binaries available for
download.
But it looks like it's only possible to compile
dynamically-linked binaries.
I'm pretty sure the default still uses static linking, even with
recent Linux releases? Either way, I'm sure there's a way to get
the old behaviour. Dynamic linking of the runtime is a relatively
recent ability.
