Expanding Phobos from a flat hierachy

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 2/6/13 8:42 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-02-06 13:02, Robert wrote:
>> On Wed, 2013-02-06 at 08:56 +0100, Don wrote:
>>> Eg, are there entire top-level branches which are obsolete? How
>>> many stupid names are there (eg, "std.algorithm2") which were
>>
>> Well in order to avoid such "stupid" names, I think it would be a good
>> idea to keep the standard library small. Include only the things that
>> are important to be "standard" in order to ensure interoperability
>> between libraries.
>>
>> Instead we should offer a central place for D libraries, like CPAN for
>> perl or http://pypi.python.org/pypi for python.
>
> Here you go:
>
> https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit/wiki/Orbit-Package-Manager-for-D
>
> I will replace the Ruby code with D.

That's awesome. I skimmed the docs and the capabilities are pretty much 
what I'd expect. We should push for integrating Orbit in the standard 
distro. That entails a formal proposal, community review and voting etc. 
etc.

One question - since you mention replacing Ruby with D, I'm thinking it 
may be a good opportunity to just use D syntax everywhere. The arguments 
have been hashed already - a D user is supposed to know of all syntaxes 
that of D itself etc.

As an example I was looking at 
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit/wiki/orbfile which has:

orb "dwt", "0.5.3" # specifies an exact version
orb "sqlite" # uses the latest version
orb "orange", "> 0.0.1" # uses any version greater than "0.0.1", 
basically any comparison operator is allowed here
orb "derelict", "~> 0.3.4" # uses any version above "0.3.4" that is 
"0.x.y", i.e. won't use any "1.x.y"     version

Nice enough but there's no shame about

orb("dwt", "0.5.3"); // specifies an exact version
orb("sqlite"); // uses the latest version
orb("orange", "> 0.0.1"); // uses any version greater than "0.0.1", 
basically any comparison operator is allowed here
orb("derelict", "~> 0.3.4"); // uses any version above "0.3.4" that is 
"0.x.y", i.e. won't use any "1.x.y"     version

The alternative orbspec 
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit/wiki/orbspec%20specification 
also has its own syntax:

# orange.orbspec
# name "orange" # inferred from the name of the orbspec
version "1.0.0"
author "Jacob Carlborg"
type :library
files << ["a.d", "b.di"] # an array of source files

This is in a way worse because there's a tidbit of syntax for each 
element. I'm thinking:

spec = "orange";
version = "1.0.0";
author = "Jacob Carlborg";
type = "library";
files = ["a.d", "b.di"]; // an array of source files

This code can be imported into an environment that has the appropriate 
definitions.

Hash table literals may also be also very useful.

Thoughts?


Andrei