Article discussing Go, could well be D

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrew Wiley" <wiley.andrew.j at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.776.1307728872.14074.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 9:29 AM, Caligo <iteronvexor at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>> > That's it. We need a package management expert on board to either 
>> > revive
>> > dsss or another similar project, or define a new package manager
>> altogether.
>> > No "yeah I have some code somewhere feel free to copy from it"; we need
>> > professional execution. Then we need to make that tool part of the
>> standard
>> > distribution such that library discovery, installation, and management 
>> > is
>> as
>> > easy as running a command.
>> >
>> > I'm putting this up for grabs. It's an important project of high 
>> > impact.
>> > Wondering what you could do to help D? Take this to completion.
>> >
>> >
>> > Andrei
>> >
>>
>> Andrei, I have to respectfully disagree with you on that, sorry.
>>
>> D is supposed to be a system programming language, not some scripting
>> language like Ruby.  Besides, the idea of some kind of package
>> management for a programming language is one of the worst ideas ever,
>> specially when it's a system programming language.  You have no idea
>> how much pain and suffering it's going to cause the OS developers and
>> package maintainers.  I can see how the idea might be attractive to
>> non-*nix users, but most other *nix OSs have some kind of package
>> management system and searching for, installing, and managing software
>> is as easy as running a command.
>>
>
> It doesn't have to be hard if you build the package manager in such a way
> that it can be integrated into the OS package manager, whether that means
> letting the OS package manager modify the language package manager's
> database or just adding a switch that turns your package manager into a 
> dumb
> build tool so dependency checks can be left to the OS package manager.
> That's my theory, anyway.
>

I'd say one critical requirement for a package manager is that it be based 
around the idea of supporting multiple versins of the same lib at the same 
time. If you're just going to re-invent your own little DLL hell you'd 
almost be better off just going with the OS package manager.