stop to maitain rpm

[David Nadlinger]

On Monday, 12 August 2013 at 13:06:46 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> In packaging Derelict for Fedora, he had been relying on a pull 
> request I accepted from him some time ago that added shared 
> library support to the Derelict build script.

Jonathan unfortunately has also opted to build druntime and 
Phobos as shared libraries in the LDC Fedora package, even if 
that is known to produce random segfaults due to the interaction 
with TLS not being properly handled yet (stay tuned for an new 
release early September including 2.063 and hopefully proper .so 
support on Linux). This might effectively be worse than having no 
D compiler package in the official repositories at all, as it is 
prone to give a false impression regarding the stability of D.

In part, this might have been partly our (or more specifically, 
my) fault for not clearly labeling the respective experimental 
CMake option as such and not explicitly pointing out the fact 
that shared libraries don't work out of the box without special 
hacks when asked about the possibility. And if I remember 
correctly, the Fedora packaging guidelines also pretty much 
prohibit distributing static libraries if it can be avoided at 
all (D is such a case, though, or has at least been until very 
recently).

In general, I think this situation highlights how important close 
collaboration and proper communication between upstream 
developers and packagers is. Sure, one could argue that the main 
project developers should also try to handle packaging for the 
most common target platforms, as it is also essential if the 
application is supposed to ever gain traction on systems where a 
package manager is used pervasively. However, in reality, we are 
all doing this in our spare time, and even if you restrict 
yourself to, say, Debian, Fedora, MacPorts and Homebrew, this 
probably means that you have to familiarize yourself with at 
least 3 systems you don't use on a daily basis before you can 
even think about creating packages for them.

Maintaining packages for your favorite system is a 
low-effort/high-impact way to help with D development; I really 
wish more users would consider lending a hand here.

David