Article discussing Go, could well be D

[Johannes Pfau]

Russel Winder wrote:
>On Sun, 2011-06-19 at 21:19 +0200, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>[ . . . ]
>> When I first started thinking about Orbit I decided for source
>> packages. The reason for this is that the developer only have to
>> create one package or doesn't have to build the app/lib for all
>> supported platforms when releasing a new version of the package
>> (although it would be good to know that it works on all supported
>> platforms).
>[ . . . ]
>
>OS-level package manages have this issue, Ports went for source and
>compiling as needed on the grounds that this is most flexible, Debian,
>Fedora, etc. went for binary on the grounds it is far, far easier for
>the users.
>
>I find that most of the time MacPorts is fine as long as you only own
>one computer, but for things like Boost, MacQt, etc. my machines takes
>hours and hours to upgrade which really, really pisses me off.  I find
>Debian package far more straightforward and furthermore binary packages
>can be cached locally so I only have to download once for all 4
>machines I have.  With source download I end up compiling twice one
>for each Mac OS X machine.  So overall source packages suck -- even
>though they are reputedly safer against security attacks.
>
>Ubuntu has introduced the idea of personal build farms, aka PPAs, which
>work very well.  This handles creating packages for all the version of
>Ubuntu still in support.  Using something like Buildbot, which although
>supposedly a CI system can easily be "subverted" into being a package
>creation farm.
>
>I guess the question is really should the package manager be easy for
>developers or easy for users?  If there are no packages because it is
>too hard for developers to package then no users either.  If developers
>can do things easily, but it is hard for users, then no users so no
>point in creating packages.
>
>It's worth noting that there is massive move in the Java arena to issue
>binary, source and documentation artefacts -- where originally only
>binary artefacts were released.  This is for supporting IDEs.  Clearly
>source only packaging gets round this somewhat, but this means
>compilation on the user's machine during install, and that leads to
>suckiness -- see above for mild rant.
>

It's possible to combine binary and source packages. Archlinux did
that: by default you install prebuilt binary packages, but you can
specify that you want to build certain packages by yourself. Archlinux
also has a huge repository of source-only packages which always need to
be build by the end user. AFAIK this system works quite well.
-- 
Johannes Pfau