On Monday, 1 June 2015 at 06:20:18 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Ditto. Dub's great if you let it be your buildsystem, but as soon as you want to use it as a package-manager-only it becomes an uphill battle with dub fighting back every step of the way (I speak from experience). That problem is worse if your project is a library that you want fetchable through dub.
And this is when Jacob Carlborg chimes in and says "I told you so." ;) His favorite complaint about dub has always been that it combined package management and the build tool into one.
dub works fantastically if you want to do everything in the standard way without any funny stuff, but it clearly doesn't have the power of a tool like make, cmake, etc. As soon as you need to do anything funny - like include anything related to other languages in your build, or put things in a specific layout because of some company-specific thing, or anything that wasn't explicitly planned for by the folks writing dub, dub just won't work.
Now, to be fair, I don't know how you can be pulling in all kinds of stray libraries with who-knows-what for their build systems and expect it to work very well via a single tool (at minimum, you have the problem that the machine that you're trying to build them on will likely be missing some of those tools), but that's pretty much what we need to handle the general case. Without that, dub will work great for the normal case (which _will_ be plenty for many, many projects), but it won't work in the general case - and corporate folks in particular are probably going to have to skip out on using it because of abnormal requirements on their part.
Even simply splitting dub out so that it can pull in packages without necessarily being able to build them would be nice (maybe adding a flag to the dub.json file indicating whether dub can be used as a build tool for the project or whether it's supposed to just act as a package manager for it), though that does add the problem of code.dlang.org becoming more confusing, since you wouldn't be able to rely on all projects on it being built for you by dub as part of the process of grabbing packages.
It's a complicate problem, and dub went a route which works in the 90% case, but doesn't work for more complicated cases, which will make dub unusable for some projects - especially corporate ones. I don't know how fixable it is without a major redesign of dub.
- Jonathan M Davis
