rdmd problems (OS X Leopard, DMD 2.052)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Magnus Lie Hetland" <magnus at hetland.org> wrote in message 
news:ijrm9q$259n$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 2011-02-19 22:25:31 +0100, Nick Sabalausky said:
>
> [snip]
>> Unfortunately, rdmd doesn't seem to have gotten much attention lately. 
>> I've had a few patches for it sitting in bugzilla for a number of months. 
>> (Not that I'm complaning, I realize there's been other priorities.)
>
> I see. Kind of surprising, given that rdmd is distributed in the official 
> DMD zip file. But, yeah, no complaints. :)
>
>> Actually, if you want, you can grab a version of rdmd.d with my patches 
>> applied here:
>> http://www.dsource.org/projects/semitwist/browser/trunk/rdmdAlt.d
>
> Thanks!
>
>> (Yes, it is 4 months old, and I can do the match: 3 < 4, but this *is* 
>> the same as the latest official version just with my patches applied: The 
>> latest official commit to rdmd.d was one of my patches (albiet slightly 
>> modified, IIRC))
>>
>> However, the latest version of DMD I used this with was 2.050, so it 
>> might still need some updating for 2.052.
>
> Hm. Are most minor releases of DMD backward-incompatible? (Sort of a scary 
> prospect to me, at least...)
>

It used to be fairly common for little things to change, but it's becoming 
much less and less common (And, as you've seen, when they do change, they're 
generally very trivial to fix). These days there's typically only these 
three cases where something might break:

A. Someone's code is accidentialy relying on a bug in DMD or Phobos, and 
that bug gets fixed. Not really a frequent occurrance.

B. Certain parts of Phobos are still somewhat in flux (only for D2 though). 
For instance, std.xml is definitely going to get completely replaced.

C. The occasional regression. (Which is less and less common these days, 
because of both an extensive test suite running on multiple OSes and because 
we now have a beta mailing list with people who test each release candidate 
before it's actually relesed.)

We used to have occasional breking changes in the language itself (in 
D2-only), since D2 was the deliberately the "development" branch rather than 
the "stable" branch that D1 has been, but D2's language spec is pretty much 
finalized now.