Issue: Installing D

[jcc7]

== Quote from Jarrett Billingsley (kb3ctd2 at yahoo.com)'s article
> "Chris Miller" <lordSaurontheGreat at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:fpfjh4$lds$1 at digitalmars.com...
> > Yeah, I read something about differences between Object.d and
> > madness like that.
> >
> > If the two library's cores are separate, it seems to me that one
> > could mitigate their differences and stick them both into the
> > default download.
> > It's very detrimental to continue to have these two libraries
> > conflicting so violently with each other.
>
> Hey, take it up with the Big Man.  There's overwhelming support for
> Tango to supplant or at least be a surrogate to Phobos, if the
> recent survey says anything, but Walter still insists on keeping
> Phobos.  There's only one person who can say which library is
> "standard" and either he doesn't _want_ to or he just doesn't have
> the time.  (My guess is a bit of both.)
>
> Until then, there's nothing anyone else can do.

I don't want this thread to become another Phobos vs. Tango thread, but I'm going
to express my opinion.

<rant>

This attitude of (paraphrasing) "there are two standard libraries because Walter
won't declare that Tango is the standard library" is part of the reason why people
don't like Tango.

(And I think that members of the Tango team have argued that the Tango team has
never called Tango a standard library. Indeed, the Tango website,
http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango, doesn't seem to refer to Tango as a
standard library.)

Phobos is the standard library: "Phobos is the standard runtime library that comes
with the D language compiler." http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/phobos/phobos.html

Tango is an alternate runtime library. It's not a standard library. Walter has
made his decision. Maybe he'll adopt Tango in the future, but Phobos was first and
Tango is the new kid. The new kid has a lot of toys and doesn't want to share the
sandbox with Phobos, but it's still the new kid.

I understand that Tango came about from merging Ares and Mango (and some other
projects), but I think it's unfortunate that it can't coexist better with Phobos
-- such as a version of Tango that is available without the runtime so that you
can download a standard DMD package from digitalmars.com and then supplement it
with some Tango goodies. It sounds like Walter is slowly accepting some runtime
improvements from Tango, but I doubt that Walter will ever accept all of Tango's
ideas. He likes to be in control and be able to judge for himself whether the code
is what he wants. The best we can realistically hope for is improved
compatibility. Tango could help by compromising some of its uniqueness when Walter
has gone as far as he's going to do. (I think that Tango has had some changes to
improve compatibility recently, and that's a good thing.)

Winning a web poll doesn't prove overwhelming support. It'll take more than that
to sway Walter. (Many people abstain from web polls because they realize they
don't have any effect.) Walter's vote is worth more than the rest of our votes.

</rant>