Dream package management system (Was: a cabal for D ?)

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 19/03/2011 14:36, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2011-03-18 18:04, Chris Manning wrote:
>> On 17/03/2011 22:49, Jason E. Aten wrote:
>>> Somewhat tongue in cheek, we could call it dabal.
>>>
>>> As in, "get on dabal!" :-)
>>
>> If D gets accepted for Google Summer of Code, I think this would be a
>> great idea for a project and I would be interested in implementing it as
>> a student. Although, it does seem overly ambitious so maybe only some of
>> this could be for the gsoc (and if I do this It'd be great to carry on
>> working on it anyway).
>>
>> What does everybody think about this? Should I draw up a proposal of
>> some kind?
>>
>> Chris
>
> I've been thinking for quite some time to build a package management
> system for D, lets call it dpac as an example. This is the ideas that I
> have:
>
> Basically copy how RubyGems works.
> Use Ruby as a DSL for dpacsepc files which is used to create to create
> the dpac file. This is an example for how a file used to build a package
> could look like:
>
> name "Foo Bar"
> summary "This is the Foo Bar package"
> version "1.0.0"
> type :lib
> author "Jacob Carlborg"
> files ["lib.d"] # list of the files in the package
> build :make # other options could be :dsss :cmake and so on
> dversion 2 # D1 or D2
>

Copying Rubygems would be a bad idea, or at least a very incomplete one. 
And the example code above shows why, doesn't anyone else see it?
Just look at the line:
build :make # other options could be :dsss :cmake and so on
Basicly, this would be a D package manager that requires another package 
manager to build D artifacts... kinda not very useful, right? If we skip 
the issue of building D artifacts (executables, dynamic libraries, 
static libraries, etc.) we skip one essential aspect of a D 
package/build management system (if not the main aspect, but that is 
debatable...). This is why I think just copying/cloning a PM from 
interpreted languages is not helping us much.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer