a cabal for D ?

[Russel Winder]

On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 20:44 +0000, Jason E. Aten wrote:
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I observe that there doesn't appear 
> to be a package management system / standard repository for D libraries.  
> Or is there?
> 
> I'm talking about something as easy to use as R's CRAN,
> > install.packages("rforest")
> 
> or cpan for perl, ctan for latex, dpgk/apt for debian, cabal for Haskell/
> Hackage, etc.

Note that every language-specific package manager conflicts directly
with every operating system package manager.  Thus RubyGems, CPAN,
Cabal, Maven, Go, etc. conflicts with the package management of Debian,
Fedora, SUSE, FreeBSD, MacPorts, etc. leading to pain.  Pain leads to
anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering.

> If there's not a commonly utilized one currently, perhaps we could 
> "borrow" cabal, with a trivial port.  cabal is Haskell's package manager.
> 
> Not only does having a standard package install system facilitate 
> adoption, it greatly facilitates code sharing and library maturation.

At the expense of easy system administration.

I guess the only up side of language specific package management is that
it enables people whose operating systems are not package structured to
do things sensibly.  Alternatively Windows users could switch to a
sensible operating system ;-)

Given that D has chosen to switch to Git for version control, doesn't
this imply that package management transported over DVCS is the way
forward.  Go has certainly taken this route.  It prioritizes Mercurial
but supports Bazaar and Git as well.


-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
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