DIP11: Automatic downloading of libraries

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:53:16 +0300, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> http://www.wikiservice.at/d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs/DIP11

Why this is a bad idea:
1) It hard-codes URLs in source code. Projects often move to other  
code-hosting services. PHP, Python, Perl, not sure about Ruby all have a  
central website which stores package metadata.
2) It requires that the raw source code be available via HTTP. Not all  
code hosting services allow this. GitHub will redirect all HTTP requests  
to HTTPS.
3) It only solves the problem for D modules, but not any other possible  
dependencies.

I understand that this is a very urgent problem, but my opinion is that  
this half-arsed solution will only delay implementing and cause migration  
problems to a real solution, which should be able to handle svn/hg/git  
checkout, proper packages with custom build scripts, versioning,  
miscellaneous dependencies, publishing, etc.

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir                            mailto:vladimir at thecybershadow.net