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

[Brad Roberts]

While DSSS is a great product in the vein of cpan and its ilk and I don't 
want to diminish it's value, but for most unix flavors, there's native 
packaging mechanisms that are preferred by the masses.

Explicitly stated:
  for freebsd, ports is king
      debian, .deb's and the various front ends is where it's at
      redhat, .rpm and yum
      windows, uh... installshield?  I dunno.. not my playground
      etc...

My primary experience is with debian.  There there's wrappers around cpan 
to facilitate creation of .deb from a cpan package should it not happen to 
be already officially packaged up (an extreme rarity).  As a maintainer of 
more systems than I care to, I value the uniformity that using a single 
package management system brings.

So.. what would really go a long way, would be a way to easily create 
native package for various platforms and a repository to be populated.  
What would then work well would be for there to be a single 'starter' 
package for D development:  probably a dmd/gdc installer + a hook to 
register the native repository with the native install system (for debian 
this would be adding a line to the /etc/apt/sources.list file).

DSSS could then mutate to a system for building and producing the 
artifacts to go into the repository, maybe.

Anyway.. food for thought.

Later,
Brad

On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Jesse Phillips wrote:

> Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 10:37:53 -0800
> From: Jesse Phillips <Jesse.K.Phillips+Digitalmars at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: digitalmars.D <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com>
> To: digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
> Newsgroups: digitalmars.D
> Subject: Re: Last DMD made me truly breathless -- for the wrong reasons
> 
> 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!
>