CURL review request

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, August 18, 2011 04:37:20 bearophile wrote:
> Jonas Drewsen:
> >If a decent package management tool was added to D which could handle
> >downloading the binary lib for you then wouldn't that be an okey solition
> >for you?<
> What I think is acceptable is to put now the binary of the Windows library
> inside the zip of the DMD distribution. Once that decent package management
> tool will be present and working on Windows, you will be free to remove the
> binary lib, if you want (but I suggest to not do it, because D std library
> is suppsed to have few batteries included, and today accessing the web is a
> basic need. Maybe even the package management tool needs a curl to download
> the files, so we are back to the start).
> 
> ----------------
> 
> dsimcha:
> >Also, anyone have any luck getting Curl libs to work with DMD on Windows? 
> >The binaries available at http://curl.haxx.se/download.html look like
> >they're COFF.  (<rant> Why do we still use freakin' OMF? </rant>)  Also,
> >the source doesn't look like it's pleasant to compile.<
> See my answer above :-) If I want to use DMD to write a 20 lines long
> script-line program I will not compile a C lib (and probably a 200 lines
> long program too).

It would be a good idea to provide links to to such a binary (probably in the 
documentation), but I definitely don't think that any such thing should be 
provided with dmd itself. It increases the size of the zip file unnecessarily 
for the majority of users, and anyone using anything other than Windows 
definitely won't need it.

So yes, we need to make it easy for people to find the appropriate binaries for 
Windows, but no, we shouldn't distribute them with dmd.

- Jonathan M Davis