The DUB package manager

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:02:16 +0100
"Dicebot" <m.strashun at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Monday, 18 February 2013 at 11:51:14 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
> wrote:
> > ...
> 
> Ugh, have you ever tried to do it in practice?

'Course not, because why should I? With OS-independent language package
managers, all I have to do is toss into a trivial ./build script the
few commands (if even that much) needed to grab the dependencies (via
DUB/Orbit/Gems/whatever) and launch my buildscript, with only minor
tweaks for the build.bat variant (which most Win users won't even need
to use at all since a prebuilt .exe is pretty much guaranteed to work
out-of-the-box). That's *all* I need for it to work for *everyone*.
*And* nobody needs to deal with a long list of "If you're on OS A do
this, if you're on OS B do this, OS C do that, etc."

Or I can use the OS-based stuff and have it only work for *some*
people on *some* OSes. Yea, that sounds really worthwhile. Even if it
*is* super-simple, as a lib or app developer I still have no reason
to even do so at all in the first place.

> Because I have 
> been maintaining few packages, primarily for Arch Linux, and it 
> is not even remotely close to what you say. There may be some 
> bureaucratic headache to get stuff into official Debian repos, 
> but you always can create your own mirror, like it was done here 
> for D stuff: http://code.google.com/p/d-apt/wiki/APT_Repository . 
> Packaging itself is always simple and requires close to zero 
> efforts.
> 

Yea, I'm sure it is a lot simpler if you're primarily targeting just one
linux distro and little else. ;) Not simpler for your users, though. :/

> And saying you don't want to learn OS package manager to 
> distribute stuff for it is like saying you don't want to learn OS 
> kernel API to write drivers to it. Sure it is so better to be 
> forced to learn dozens of language-specific package & build 
> managers to just get a single application working. 

If you're dealing with a handful of different languages just to write
one program, you're already doing it wrong to begin with. (That's the
generalized "you", I don't mean you specifically). And even if that
weren't the case, how is needing to deal with a variety of different
OS-specific package managers just to release one program any better?