[Issue 16746] Please output Makefile-style depfiles for ninja and make

[via Digitalmars-d-bugs]

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16746

--- Comment #11 from Vladimir Panteleev <thecybershadow at gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Matthias Klumpp from comment #10)
> Because the wrapper is not available everywhere, and going through a wrapper
> in order to fix a missing thing in dmd is just a workaround. DMD(FE) should
> be able to do this natively.
> When adding support to Meson/CMake/Automake/Makefiles, telling users that
> they need the compiler but also this other tool which - in the Meson world -
> has the sole purpose of supplying a missing functionality in DMD is pretty
> cumbersome. It's a workaround, but no real solution to the issue.

I'm not sure about referring to a requested feature as "missing functionality",
but thanks for the clarification.

Regardless, we will hopefully one day have rdmd as part of dmd itself, or use
the compiler as a library, so duplicating functionality in both dmd and rdmd
right now does not look very appealing; until then, you may want to look into
more pragmatic solutions, such as using rdmd.

> At the moment, Debian/Uhuntu/Fedora/OpenSUSE and probably a couple of other
> don't ehip rdmd at all, which makes demanding it just to work around this
> bug not worthwile anyway.

I think rdmd should be shipped in the same package as dmd. This is how the
binary packages from dlang.org for all platforms are. Picking and choosing
which utilities the distribution considers useful will inevitably lead to
confusion and a poorer user experience.

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