DIP11: Automatic downloading of libraries

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:it91me$b2g$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> If we want to support using multiple versions of the
>> same lib in an app then some more thought will have to go into how
>> this will work.
>
> Versioning is absolutely trivial if the version is part of the
> module name.
>
> This is a better way to do it long term too; it's future proof.
> Download any module, no matter how old, and it will still compile.
>
> To update your code to the new version, do a "grep import foo_1"
> and replace them with "import foo_2" and recompile. This is
> probably less effort than actually updating your code to use
> version 2!

First of all, that can't be automated reliably (at least not within reason). 
Suppose there's two spaces. Or (heaven forbid!) a tab. Or anything else that 
just happens to be non-standard that you just happened to not take into 
account in your grep line. Such as mixin-generated imports, which are only 
going to be more common now that there's going to be usable inside 
functions. Plus not everyone's a command-line whiz, which makes that a lot 
of manual tedium for them.

Second, you shouldn't need to edit code to compile against a different 
version of a lib.

I'm not *necessarily* opposed to the idea versions being part of the name 
(although it does prevent you from being able to reliably do an ordered 
comparison of versions unless you have a standardize naming scheme - in 
which case it's effectively not really part of the name anyway). But it 
shouldn't seep into the user code unless the user of the library wants it 
to.