Article discussing Go, could well be D

[Andrew Wiley]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 3:48 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.
>
>
Well, yes, but if the OS package manager can't handle multiple versions of
the same lib (and so far, I haven't seem one that can), making that work
isn't a necessary part of OS package manager integration. I agree that the
language package manager should be able to manage multiple versions in
whatever local stores it maintains.
The trick is that if I install a package through the OS package manager,
there needs to be a way for the language package manager to know what was
installed and use that if possible. And, when an application is released, it
needs to be possible for it to be built as an OS package depending entirely
on other OS packages instead of the language package manager's local stores,
and if the language package manager is built in such a way that this is
feasible, it should become much more useful.
This is all just hand-waving at this point, but it seems like if a sane
method can be devised to make this sort of thing happen, the end result will
be much better.
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