Dub support was added to Meson

[Russel Winder]

On Thu, 2018-08-16 at 22:44 +0000, Filipe Laíns via Digitalmars-d-announce
wrote:
[…]

Apologies for the delay in replying to this one.

> This is obviously bad. Your distro has a package manager, you 
> should use it, not create a separated language-specific one. If 

I'm afraid you are onto a lost cause on this one. The whole JVM-based milieu,
Ruby, Python, Go, D, Rust, etc. all have language specific repositories.
Debian, Fedora, etc. pick and choose which bits they choose to package based
on some algorithm almost, but not quite, totally unrelated to what is the
latest version. Operating system package managers are providing the operating
system, not the development tools and dependencies needed for software
development. 

Go, Rust, and indeed D, are going the route of static compilation as much
because operating system dependencies can never be guaranteed, and are often
wrong. It is not clear to me why Debian spend so much time packaging bits of
the Go universe that no-one uses even if the dependencies are in fact used.

On the other hand, having GtkD (and GStreamerD) packaged is great since there
are shared objects for use with D codes. There is nothing quite so depressing
as waiting for LDC or DMD to statically link to GtkD. So static linking is not
something I want. But waiting for Debian and Fedora to package things is often
like Waiting for Godot. Hence "build it yourself" becomes a bit of a must.

This is not a simple situation, and every individuals positions on it is
likely inconsistent and full of holes. 

> you are doing this locally, either but using the user's home of 
> by installing to /usr/local, I don't think it's much of a 
> problem. If you are implementing something like this at least do 
> it in a way that the package managing feature is optional. I 
> don't know if I'm being biased by being an Archlinux TU but from 
> my perspective, it's not something we should do, at the very 
> least globally.

It may be that Arch stays more up to date than Debian and Fedora (because it
is less centralised and more like Homebrew/Linuxbrew, but Debian (and Fedora?)
is where the bulk of Linux programs get executed, and so is the obvious place
to develop.
 
> Weirdly enough, I can reproduce. This was working when I wrote 
> the patch. I've opened an issue in the upstream.

Excellent.  I have a clone of Meson so can try stuff out on master/HEAD as
needed.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

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