rdmd problems (OS X Leopard, DMD 2.052)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
news:ijs1vp$3b3$1 at digitalmars.com...
> "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.
>

I just realized I didn't give a direct answer to your question: I'd say that 
most minor releases of DMD are *not* backward-incompatible.