On Saturday, 10 December 2011 at 08:55:57 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
I think I've come so far in my development of a package manager
that it's time to think how it should interact with the
compiler.
Currently I see two use cases:
1. When the package manager installs (and builds) a package
2. When a user (developer) builds a project and want's to use
installed packages
In the best of worlds the user wouldn't have to do anything and
it just works. The package manger needs to somehow pass import
paths to the compiler and libraries to link with.
I'm not entirely sure what the best method to do this would be.
But I'm thinking that if the compiler could accept compiler
flags passed via environment variables use case 1 would be easy
to implement.
For use case 2 it would be a bit more problematic. In this use
case the user would need to somehow tell the package manager
that I want to use these packages, something like:
// project.obspec
orb "foo"
orb "bar"
$ orb use project.obspec
or for single packages
$ orb use foobar
$ dmd project.d
If environment variables are used in this case, then the
package manager would need a shell script wrapper, the same way
as DVM does it, to be able to set environment variables for the
parent (the shell). The reason for this is that a child process
(the package manager) can't set environment variables for the
parent process (the shell). This complicates the implementation
and installation of the package manager and requires different
implementations for Posix and Windows.
Another idea would be to manipulate the dmd.conf/sc.ini file
but that seems to be quite complicated and messy. On the other
hand, this wouldn't require any changes to the compiler.
Any other ideas?
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit/wiki/Orbit-Package-Manager-for-D
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit
For use case 1 the package manager could just as well call dmd
directly with the correct flags ie. no need for using environment
variables. Use case 2 does not belong to a package manager in my
opinion. It is the job of a build tool to configure packages for
a project. What would be nice to have support for using packages
without a build tool. Maybe something like what pkg-config
provides:
dmd -ofhello `orb -lib foo` hello.d where "org -lib foo"
returns the flags to use the foo package.
/Jonas
