Last DMD made me truly breathless -- for the wrong reasons

[Jesse Phillips]

DSSS would make a good distro for dmd/build. May not be feasible now,
but some day.

Georg Wrede wrote:
> My experiences last night
> 
> 
> I've been doing production work in D for some six months now. Therefore
> I have been a bit reluctant to actually download the latest versions for
> testing, we've settled on 0.166 on Linux, and want to stay with it for
> some time past D 1.0.
> 
> Yesterday I couldn't resist, so I installed .174 on my w2k laptop -- and
> I was in for a major jolt:
> 
> Idly browsing dmd/bin I found that one of the exes actually had an icon.
> So I double-clicked it, and guess what, a simple wysiwyg GUI editor pops
> up! Wow, now we can make simple GUI apps right out of the box! And I
> found a small and nice text editor already configured for D there, too!
> 
> How come I've missed the buzz? Well, I guess D development is really
> putting on an exponential speed. Hoy contenders, resistance is futile!
> 
> Some research this morning revealed the day-after: I must have
> downloaded DFL in the spring and forgotten to erase the dm and dmd
> hierarchies before unzipping. Oh well, it's the small things, like always.
> 
> 
> Some observations
> 
> While I actually believed I was using this "shrink-wrap-DMD", I had
> several different feelings about it:
> 
>  - wow, D is leaping forward -- where will we be in six months?!!
>  - unfair to only provide GUI stuff for Windows
>  - later it felt ok, since most D users are on Windows anyway
>  - Walter's really out to impress the crap out of folks
> 
> After my bitter fall to ground, I felt:
> 
>  - why not?
>  - some freebies in there make it feel polished, and "bigger"
>  - ok, it's not Eclipse, but it could be touted as "a largish example"
>  - OTOH, it must be awkward for Digital Mars:
>     - quality issues
>     - rights issues
>     - the hassle, maintenance, support...
>     - uncertainty about continued support from the app authors
>     - upgrades syncing, especially waiting for the apps to catch up!
>     - fighting with folks about who's stuff to include
> 
> 
> Things learned
> 
> Obviously Walter can't be burdened with all this. So, what's left?
> IMHO, we could re-examine the idea about there being "D distros".
> 
> We could have a few distros, each trying to be more user friendly, more
> outa-the-zip usable, and later distros for specific things, like games
> development, office stuff development, systems stuff, etc. If Linux
> seems to prosper with it, then I see no reason why D couldn't.
> 
> The DMD license could deny charging for such distros. At the same time
> the text would recommend contacting DM, "for very reasonable deals" on
> for-profit distribution, including book-sleeve CDs.
> 
> This way Walter could concentrate on exactly what he's doing right now,
> and what he's better at than anybody else: rocketing D to places where
> no language has gone!