Official dub packages for Debian and Ubuntu

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Tue, 2016-04-12 at 01:58 +0000, Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d-
announce wrote:
> On Monday, 11 April 2016 at 21:58:55 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
> wrote:
> > 
> > On Monday, 11 April 2016 at 14:21:46 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> > > 
[…]

> > Curious question: what's the Debian policy these days on what D 
> > compiler should be used to build D packages?
> There is no real policy, at least I have found none. But from my 
> tests, ldc simply crashed right away when trying to compile, 
> later it wasn't able to process some code gdc had no problems 
> with (I haven't tried the upcoming release). Since the GNU 
> Compiler Collection is Debian's default compiler, I have set the 
> compiler dependency of dub to gdc | ldc | d-compiler, so gdc is 
> preferred, but replacing it with any other compiler will work too.

If the Debian ldc2 compiler is crashing on the same source that gdc
compiles that sounds like a packaging problem. Or use of outdated D?
ldc is generally much more up to date that gdc so shouldn't the order
be ldc | gdc | d-compiler?

On Debian Sid ldc2 is 2.068.2 and gdc doesn't advertise which version
of D it is. 

I assume that the DMD package from dlang, or better d-apt, sets the d-
compiler property. Should dmd be prefered if it is present?

> > 
> > And has dub's config been tweaked accordingly in terms of which 
> > compiler it prefers to use ... ?
> I didn't touch that, since dub seems to automatically find the 
> right compiler. The preference seems to be dmd >> gdc >> ldc2, 
> which looks sane to me.

Sane, yes, but dmd → ldc2 → gdc is probably a better choice simply
because ldc tends to be more up to date than gdc – this is not a
maintainer problem just a release flow problem.

> It's really bad that GDC isn't part of the official GCC yet, and 
> the standard libraries differ so much between the compilers 
> (mainly due to phobos progressing very quickly).

GDC is definitely ipart of the GCC thanks to Iain's ongoing efforts,
with support from others. GDC would not be in the Debian repository if
it wasn't part of GCC.

The problem here is that the Fedora GCC packagers package GCC-Go but do
not package GDC. This means GDC is not present in any of Fedora,
CentOS, RHEL, Scientific Linux.

The last on this list is more important than you might think. 

Also the ldc package in Rawhide is only 0.16.1 which is really rather
ancient.

> For Debian Stretch I assume the situation will be much better 
> though :-) (given the state of the LDC and GDC Git repos).

I think the policy simply has to be to make sure that LDC and GDC are
as up to date as possible in Sid ­– which already happens – and in
Fedora Rawhide – which no-one but me seems to think is important.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d-announce/attachments/20160412/9f6270d8/attachment-0001.sig>