Dream package management system (Was: a cabal for D ?)

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-03-18 18:04, Chris Manning wrote:
> On 17/03/2011 22:49, Jason E. Aten wrote:
>> Somewhat tongue in cheek, we could call it dabal.
>>
>> As in, "get on dabal!" :-)
>
> If D gets accepted for Google Summer of Code, I think this would be a
> great idea for a project and I would be interested in implementing it as
> a student. Although, it does seem overly ambitious so maybe only some of
> this could be for the gsoc (and if I do this It'd be great to carry on
> working on it anyway).
>
> What does everybody think about this? Should I draw up a proposal of
> some kind?
>
> Chris

I've been thinking for quite some time to build a package management 
system for D, lets call it dpac as an example. This is the ideas that I 
have:

Basically copy how RubyGems works.
Use Ruby as a DSL for dpacsepc files which is used to create to create 
the dpac file. This is an example for how a file used to build a package 
could look like:

name "Foo Bar"
summary "This is the Foo Bar package"
version "1.0.0"
type :lib
author "Jacob Carlborg"
files ["lib.d"] # list of the files in the package
build :make # other options could be :dsss :cmake and so on
dversion 2 # D1 or D2

Build a dpac package out of the dpacspec file:

dpac foobar.dpacspec

Publish the package:

$ dpac publish foobar

Install the package:

$ dpac install foobar

A dpac package would just be a zip file (or some other type of archive) 
containing all the necessary files to build the package and a file with 
meta data.

All packages would be manged on a basic RESTful web server. Using GET to 
download a package and POST to publish a package.

I'm working on a build system for D that I was thinking about to 
integrate with the package management system. Then the build system 
could track the files needed to build the package, making the "files" 
attribute optional.

I also has a tool called DVM, https://bitbucket.org/doob/dvm , used for 
installing and managing different versions of D compilers. I was 
thinking about integrating DVM with the package management system to be 
able to install different packages for different compilers.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg