To clarify this point on the list:
On Thursday, 22 December 2016 at 10:40:32 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 23:08:28 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
https://gist.github.com/ximion/77dda83a9926f892c9a4fa0074d6bf2b
Aren't requirements for packaging and recent versions mutually
exclusive? The packaged version will undergo version freeze and
will be older than the recent version no matter what you
package.
This is true when the distribution is frozen, but there is a time
when we will just get new software versions in there as soon as
they are released.
But the much more important point for us is support and
maintainability. The reference compiler will have a much bigger
development team and higher focus of attention. Additionally,
people will likely build their code with that compiler and might
not test with other compilers.
So, if we then take D code and build it with a configuration
upstream didn't test, and then encounter a bug, this will be an
additional obstacle to overcome when communicating with upstream.
Furthermore, the compiler package - once frozen - will have to be
supported for many years, and a bigger team behind it helps in
finding issues and fixing them. Additionally, people learning D
will told "use DMD" and won't find it in their distribution,
which is annoying for them (they think D isn't well supported,
while our LDC/GDC packages are less used).
Those are all points which make it useful to have a completely
free compiler as reference compiler and in the distribution.
On the point of "free" being ideological: It of course is also an
ideological issue, but that's not the only point.
See this excerpt from the DMD backend license:
```
The Software is copyrighted and comes with a single user license,
and may not be redistributed. If you wish to obtain a
redistribution license,
please contact Digital Mars.
```
This alone makes it impossible for use and all our derivatives to
legally redistribute the software. Adding it to a distro is a
no-op.
Also, licenses restricting modification of software or
proprietary software in general makes it impossible for use to
deliver security fixes, and also makes integrating the software
into the system much harder and sometimes impossible.
For GDC: Being part of GCC would be very awesome there, because
then the Toolchain team of the respective distributions could
easily make the D compiler available and maintain it (as done
with e.g. gccgo for the Go language). At time we patch in GDC and
Debian, but it looks like Red Hat will not go that way on
RHEL/Fedora (and I completely understand why they don't want to
do that).
Anyway, it's great to hear that the GDC Phobos isn't as old
anymore as it was when I wrote the first version of the list :)
Confusing claim that he can't use dmd given that he says he
uses it.
Huh? Where is this stated?
