On 2011-08-05 11:53, Marco Leise wrote:
I have noticed DVM around. The situation on Gentoo is typically that when there are different versions of the same package, that can be installed in different 'slots'. A dependency of these packages is a control file for eselect, a tool to switch between the currently active implementation (OpenJDK, Sun Java, ...), package version (boost) and several other system configuration options. 'python' for example ends up as a symlink to either python2.7 or python3.1 and there are corresponding directory names for the libraries. It would be ideal if dmd was a symlink to either dmd1 or dmd2 and they would both use a separate dmd.conf. But since the source code is available for a while now that should be easy to make possible. I have never used DVM, but I imagine it works like Maven or the Eclipse updater. So it would download precompiled compilers and libraries into the user's home directory, right? With Gentoo being a source distribution it is usually avoided to download binaries from the internet so I guess DVM would be one of two options to install D compilers on Gentoo. The difference in usage would be like this for an installation: dvm: "dvm install 1.068" portage: "emerge =dmd-1.068" and this for setting the system-wide default compiler: dvm use 1.068 -d eselect dmd set dmd1 Granted, the portage version would only allow one dmd 1 compiler to be installed at a time, but that is ok for most users. I guess in theory there could even be slots for every single release of dmd. This is already done for Boost and automake in practice (with major revisions). OTOH there is no option to set the compiler for the current shell, but maybe "export DMD=dmd1", "make posix.mak" should work.
It seems like DVM and portage/eselect are similar. I think it's a huge advantage to be able to have multiple versions of DMD installed. I use both D1 and D2, (mostly D1). I also think it's especially useful when there's almost always something that breaks in a new release of DMD. Then you can easily go back to an older version if you need to.
BTW, Nick Sabalausky is working on making it possible to install DMD from github via DVM.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
