Article discussing Go, could well be D

[Caligo]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
> "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.
>
>
>
>

I think what you are describing is called atomic builds.  I think any
package manager should have it.  I only know of Nix that supports such
a feature.  http://nixos.org/nix/