dlang.org/posix.mak dependencies

[Borden]

On Tuesday, 28 May 2013 at 00:50:04 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 02:14:06 Borden wrote:
>> Good evening, all,
>> 
>> I'm making a new thread on this because my question isn't
>> strictly related to the DDoc issues I've mentioned in earlier
>> threads. Rather, it has to do with the dependencies of the
>> posix.mak file in the dlang.org repo (on GitHub, for greater
>> clarity):
>> 
>> posix.mak, beginning at line 236, compiles local copies of DMD,
>> DRuntime and Phobos. Is all of this extra compilation really
>> necessary for someone who, presumably, already installed D 
>> using
>> the installer packages?
>> 
>> Wouldn't it be more reasonable to see if the most current 
>> version
>> of DMD is installed and, if not, panic out and tell the user to
>> go and fetch the latest copy from the website? Then the rest of
>> the makefile could use the installed copies on the user's
>> computer rather than download and recompile them?
>> 
>> This question is specific to the dlang.org repo and NOT to any
>> other repos hosted at GitHub.
>
> It's a bad idea to assume that a released version of dmd and 
> Phobos will work
> with the current git repos. It's far less of an issue than it 
> used to be, but
> breaking changes still happen (some of which are regressions 
> and get fixed and
> some of which are on purpose), and there's no guarantee that 
> there haven't
> been changes which require that you have the latest of 
> everything in order to
> build the git versions.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Good evening, Jonathan,

The thing, though, is that, unless I've misread the makefile, 
dlang.org doesn't have any code that needs compiling. All it 
needs DMD for is to generate the documentation (which, I'm 
presuming, can be accomplished by the most current released 
version) and generate the docfiles for the Phobos libraries 
(which, I'm guessing, should be compiled against a current 
release of the libraries).