An open question to Rebuild users

[Gregor Richards]

Judging by the amount of feedback I receive on rebuild, vs the amount of 
feedback I receive on DSSS, I'd say that 95% of rebuild users are not 
DSSS users. That is, there are more users who use rebuild alone than in 
tandem with DSSS. I could be wrong - maybe DSSS just has no bugs :).

Rebuild was designed primarily to complement DSSS, and DSSS was designed 
to be the ideal replacement for 'make' and pals for D, so I find it a 
bit disconcerting that a tool I designed primarily to be a background 
tool is being used as a primary development tool by so many.

So, the obvious question is: Why? Why use rebuild and not DSSS? I 
imagine there must be some misconceptions about DSSS, what it is, what 
it's for, et cetera.

I imagine some common misconceptions are:

  * DSSS is intended solely to be D's answer to CPAN - that is, a 
network installation tool. This just isn't true, the net portion is only 
a small chunk of what DSSS can do.

  * DSSS provides no advantages over using just a build tool. Also not 
true - even if DSSS provided /only/ a convenient build configuration 
file format (dsss.conf), that would be a sizable advantage of rebuild. 
DSSS provides much more, however, including easy generation of libraries 
with associated .di files, installation, documentation, etc, etc. If you 
really want your rebuild profile for an application or library be 
portable, you would need to either have several Makefiles or response 
files wrapped around rebuild (nasty), or use DSSS (nice).

  * DSSS is not portable to Windows. I think most people know that I'm 
not a Windows user, and Windows is mostly a foreign environment to me. 
However, this is not true. I've done my best, and am very responsive to 
bug reports, and DSSS does indeed work on Windows just as well as it 
does on Posix systems.

  * `dsss` is hard to type. Well, I've typed it more than a dozen times 
in this post, and my left ring finger is in no particular pain :)

If your concern or concept isn't noted here, please tell me / ask me! If 
DSSS /isn't/ everything you need it to be, help me /make/ it what you 
need it to be :).

  - Gregor Richards