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

[Anders F Björklund]

Georg Wrede wrote:

> With Linux (and Unix and BSD and Mac), the distros I'm talking about 
> should of course adhere to existing standards. That is, be packaged as 
> ..rpm files (for RedHat) and whatever else is customary on the other 
> 'nixes. This is obvious.

We have RPMs for RedHat/Fedora, DEBs for Debian/Ubuntu, an ebuild for
Gentoo, and I think there is a port for FreeBSD somewhere as well...

They will even handle installing the old "compat" libstdc++.so it needs,
upgrade the configuration and handle upgrades + all such other niceties.

> On Windows, I believe the distros should essentially be self installing 
> packages. Whether they are created with Install Shield or hand-made, 
> that is mainly the distro creator's head ache. The customer really cares 
> only about ease and reliability.

I think the Nullsoft installer system (NSIS) is great, and recommend it.
It's easy to use, open source, and creates low overhead installers EXEs.

For Mac OS X one can use the built-in Installer.app and create similar
installer PKGs, even if it is not as good as the Linux package managers.

> The most primitive distros could simply 
> be .zip archives that contain a .bat file that the readme tells you to 
> run once.

That would be the Digital Mars distribution then. Well, minus .bat ;-)
Unfortunately the .tgz version, with UNIX linefeeds, is still missing...

For the add-on libraries, it looks like DSSS could be a good thing -
I only need to get the new GDC, the new Bud and DSSS all packaged up.

> Of course that would be the cleanest alternative. And no doubt, if ever 
> this distro thing gets off ground, surely there will be at least one 
> that combines GDC with a bunch of GPL+FDL stuff only.

There are two such GDC "distros", for Mac and Win, maybe one for Linux.
But there isn't very much bundled except the D compiler at the moment.

Future releases will feature more import modules and more documentation,
this is something that has been planned all along. Just not completed.

>> AFAIK, the DM license forbids all re-distribution of the DMD software ?
>> So if I made a friendly installer for DMC/DMD, I couldn't distribute it.
> 
> The point of my post was to encourage Walter to slightly adjust this 
> single aspect of the DM license, for this very purpose.

There are ready-made installer templates, if Walter wants to use them ?
(I know that I have "donated" a specfile for RPM and a script for NSIS)
So there are no technical reasons why there aren't any DMD installers ?
It's just that Walter prefers the archives, and distributing it himself.

If the DMD compiler and D specification were re-distributable, then we 
could help out. But since they're not, we can only wait until they are ?
It's not that it is *hard* to go to ftp.digitalmars.com for DMD or to 
www.digitalmars.com for D, but it cannot be compared with being Free...

--anders