DMD 1.024 and 2.008 releases

[Brad Roberts]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Walter Bright wrote:

> BCS wrote:
> > Laziness/incompetence mostly. Actually it has no Internet connection so I
> > would have to play a few fun games to get anything done.
> > 
> > Come to think of it though, I do have 2 blank hard drive in it that I could
> > play with....
> > 
> > Short version is it would be a pain. If you can build DMD with stuff that
> > won't require people to update it would save a lot of effort for a bunch of
> > people.
> 
> When I built dmd with the old library, then people with the modern ubuntu had
> to go find the old C shared library and install that. So somebody will be
> inconvenienced. I think it's better to make things painless for people using
> the latest linux.

Careful.. details here are important.

The past releases have needed an older version of libstdc++, the c++ 
runtime (primarily stl).  It's easy to have multiple versions of libstdc++ 
installed and all distributions package several of them for just this 
situation.

This current release apparantly needs libc 2.4 or greater.  libc tends to 
be great at backwards compatibility (ie, running apps built against 2.2 
can still run against installations with 2.4), but the reverse isn't true.  
It's either very hard or practically impossible to have multiple versions 
of libc installed and upgrading it is usually only done during whole os 
updates.  As a case in point, would you upgrade your old box's libc in 
isolation?  Probably not.

Either way, this change in the 1.x series seems inappropriate.  It might 
be ok for 2.x, though will cost some number of adopters to put it off for 
a later date.

Later,
Brad