Biggest problems w/ D - strings

[Chris Nicholson-Sauls]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Chris Nicholson-Sauls wrote:
[snip]
>> Oh... my.  (*dejected sigh*)  No frets.  The bits that are causing 
>> that problem are horridly out of date and mostly mildly incomplete.  
>> Much of Cashew will be getting re-written and/or updated soon.  I'll 
>> let you know when the Mango dependencies have been cleaned out.
> 
> Sure.  Well, currently my dsss.conf for cashew consists of exactly two 
> lines:
> 
> ---------dsss.conf---------
> name = cashew
> [cashew]
> -------end dsss.conf-------
> 
> And mango's is only slightly longer:
> 
> ---------dsss.conf---------
> name = mango
> [mango/icu]
> [mango/net]
> [mango/xml]
> ---------dsss.conf---------
> 
> 
> If there are parts that are basically dead right now and shouldn't be 
> included, then you can just add an 'exclude' line.  I.e. if you just 
> want to leave out the mango-depending parts just make it e.g.:
> 
> ---------dsss.conf---------
> name = cashew
> [cashew]
> exclude = cashew/utils/Benchmark.d
> -------end dsss.conf-------
> 
>> A question: when requesting, for example, Tango from 'dsss net' does 
>> it grab the latest official release, or the current SVN snapshot?  If 
>> the latter, I may just go ahead and try DSSS out and make Cashew ready 
>> myself.
> 
> I _think_ it grabs it from the latest SVN.  And then optionally applies 
> a dsss compatibility patch to it.  If so then it should be pretty 
> trivial to change dsss to grab a particular branch/tag from svn instead 
> of the default branch.  Maybe it already has this capability?  I do 
> think DSSS is going to have to confront the versioning issue soon, 
> though.  There needs to be a way to ask for a specific version when 
> using net install.  And maybe even a way to install more than one 
> version of the same package.  The other package manager I'm familiar 
> with (Python setuptools/eggs) handle both.  Basically instead of 
> installing package foo into the "foo" directory, it installs it into a 
> directory like "foo-{fooversion}-{pythonversion}.egg/foo", and then adds 
> "foo-{fooversion}-{pythonversion}.egg" to a file that lists the current 
> include path.  I think a similar scheme could work for dsss.  It lets 
> you have more than one version of a package installed, but the order in 
> that that master list of includes determines globally which version is 
> active.
> 

Ruby Gems also allows having multiple versions installed, although I've never looked into 
the details of how it keeps them.  Gem also has 'update' for generically grabbing new 
versions of installed packages, and 'cleanup' for likewise uninstalling old versions.  If 
and when DSSS adds support for multiple installations, something like these two commands 
would be doubtless useful.  I've used them, for example, to test whether or not a new 
version of a library breaks anything before I commit to updating it.

-- Chris Nicholson-Sauls