An open question to Rebuild users

Jari-Matti Mäkelä jmjmak at utu.fi.invalid
Mon Apr 16 14:12:11 PDT 2007


Gregor Richards wrote:

> 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 :).

I've found more bugs in Rebuild. For me that's to only reason. I use
both of them.

I think being able to install Tango with DSSS would increase its
popularity. I've probably set up my system wrong since 'dsss net install
dmd' breaks my manually installed Tango.

> 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.

Most probably this.

>  * 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).

I think the misconception here is that people really don't know how to
do all this. I hope you take this constructively: the documentation
sucks. In fact, I haven't found one anywhere. :-P The 'dsss --help' does
not count. I would like to see a real manual with some simple examples.
'dsss net install foobar' does not save any easily readable
configuration files to any well documented location.

In fact, I was considering makefiles + rebuild for my next project since
I don't know how to use DSSS. Maybe that will change now. ;)

>  * 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.

No.

>  * `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 :)

Certainly not. :)



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