Ubuntu 1-click install for DMD 2.012

[Georg Wrede]

Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:05:04 -0500, Jason House wrote:
> 
> 
>>John Reimer wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Dejan Lekic wrote:
>>>
>>>>Mr. Bright,
>>>>I thought it is illegal to pack DMD and distribute it. Since Mr.
>>>>Vlasceanu obviously did the Debian package, may I maintain and
>>>>distribute Fedora & OpenSuse DMD packages?
>>>>
>>>>Kind regards
>>>>
>>>>Walter Bright wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>This was prepared by Cristi Vlasceanu (of Zerobugs fame!)
>>>>>
>>>>>http://ftp.digitalmars.com/dmd_2.012-030608_i386.deb
>>>
>>>
>>>It's being distributed on the digitalmars site, so it's not illegal for
>>>Walter. :)
>>>
>>>-JJR
>>
>>Hmmm... How hard would it be to tweak the distribution mechanism such
>>that ubuntu users can add digital mars to /etc/apt/sources.list?  If
>>that's done, users will automagically be prompted with the option to
>>upgrade with each new release (and other nifty stuff like command-line
>>updates... apt-get install dmd)
> 
> 
> digitalmars would have to run a repository for it but I don't think it 
> would be too hard to set up. One of my concerns right now is the fact 
> that you can't install dmd2 and dmd1 side by side, well you can but the 
> conf file doesn't handle it. I feel being able to install all variations 
> of the compiler should be supported. This, to me, would resolve a lot of 
> the "competition."

I second that!

For a small company this really is a problem. During the years different 
apps get programmed to different customers, and it's easiest to do bug 
fixing and incrementals using the same version of D as the original. 
(Porting to the latest D is unfeasible for every little bug fix, since 
it may cause a lot of "unnecessary" work, especially when the app is 
nontrivial.)

Simply, if Walter changes the library naming convention to something like

libphobos<dmd-version-number>[debug/release]

we'd be a long way towards the goal. Of course additionally we need to 
fix paths and such on our development machines whenever we "switch" 
compilers, but that's a piece of cake, compared.