On Thursday, 21 April 2016 at 01:01:01 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
## Where should D source-code / D interfaces be put?
If I install a D library or source-only module as a
distribution package, where should the sources be put? So far,
I have seen:
* /usr/include/d
* /usr/include/dlang/
* /usr/include/d/(dmd|gdc|ldc)
* /usr/share/dlang
Having one canonical path would be awesome ;-)
/usr/include/d or /usr/include/dlang. I prefer /usr/include/d as
it's shorter, but the important point is that we need to decide
on a common standard.
You currently can't install druntime or phobos headers in this
directory, as each compiler will have slightly modified versions
and then you end up with /usr/include/d/(dmd|gdc|ldc). But all
other library headers should be shareable between compilers and
can be placed in /usr/include/d. (This might even work for
phobos, I don't think we have many compiler specific changes
there. But then you need to use the same frontend version for all
compilers.) You can only install headers for one library version
with this approach! A versioned approach is nicer
/usr/include/d/libfoo/1.0.0 but requires explicit compiler
support and it's unlikely this will happen (or explicit dub
support and you compile everything through dub).
## dub: Where should dub modules be installed?
What does FHS recommend in this case? If you only keep
headers/sources you could install into /usr/include. Otherwise
you probably need /var/cache or /var/lib or somehting like that.
If you split packages you could use the standard /usr/lib*
folders but then you need to keep versioned subdirectories to
support installing multiple versions.
## dub: How to install modules?
Ideally, dub would also have a "dub install" command, to
install the binary, "headers (.di)"/sources and data into
standard directories on Linux.
(reported as https://github.com/dlang/dub/issues/811 )
See above. The main question is: Do you want to have a C style
install of one version of a library and have gdc find the
includes and library when running gdc main.a -libfoo or do you
want dub-style support for multiple library versions which means
you need to compile everything through dub.
I'd love to have some extended compiler support (so you could
simply do gdc -use=libfoo:1.0.0 and this would pick up the
correct headers and linker flags). But as some DMD maintainers
are opposed to this idea it won't happen. You'll probably always
need dub for a 'nice' user interface.
++++++
Aside from these things, there are also some other things which
would be very useful:
## Shared library support in all compilers
This is mainly a GDC issue. DMD and LDC support shared libs,
although I don't think these libraries are ABI compatible.
