dud: A dub replacement

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On Monday, 18 November 2019 at 19:44:46 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Mon, 2019-11-18 at 15:35 +0000, Joseph Rushton Wakeling via 
> Digitalmars-d- announce wrote:
>> 
> […]
>> It is quite extraordinary how readily folks fall to arguing 
>> over what the config format should be, rather than what the 
>> app should actually be able to do. :-\
>
> Perhaps because writing the configuration files is a critical 
> part of the usability of the tool.

Fair.  My remark was maybe a little too intemperate :-)

I'm simply concerned that if we don't put enough scrutiny on the 
app features and behaviour, we run the risk of simply reproducing 
some of the problematic design decisions of the existing tool.

As an example -- try running `dub test --build=release`.  
Intuition suggests that this is testing a release build.  But 
actually it strips out your unittests, because `--build=release` 
determines not only the optimization flags, but the complete set 
of DFLAGS used -- and `-unittest` isn't among them.

I ran `dub test && dub test --build=release` as a matter of habit 
for some time before discovering the latter wasn't actually 
testing anything.  And while I now know that I _can_ define a 
custom build to get what I want, that's clumsy and hard(er) to 
discover, and annoying to have to repeat for every project I 
create.

That's the kind of usability and design concern we really ought 
to be revisiting in any rewrite.