dub: should we make it the de jure package manager for D?

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 10/09/13 22:48, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> We've been experimenting with http://code.dlang.org for a while and things are
> going well. In particular Sönke has been very active about maintaining and
> improving it, which brings further confidence in the future of the project.
>
> We're considering making dub the official package manager for D. What do you all
> think?

I have no direct experience of using dub, so take this as the point of view of 
someone coming to it fresh and with a "What's this all about?" mindset.

Anyway, these are the general things I feel:

    * Having an official package manager (and hence package repo) is a great way
      to get round the current state of confusion about D libraries, with
      orphaned projects in places like dsource.org etc.

      In fact I think having a well-maintained one-stop shop to find actively
      maintained/developed D libraries is _more_ important than having a nice
      tool to install them -- but a good tool is the icing on the cake, because
      it makes it easy to just grab stuff.

    * It doesn't matter that much if the tool isn't perfect right now.  Obviously
      if Sönke has objections that matters, but otherwise, moving forward is a
      good motivation for everyone to join in and fix any flaws.

    * Currently I think the documentation for dub is inadequate, at least that
      which was trivial for me to find.  I guess that extra stuff might be
      available post-install via --help or man-pages, but that material needs
      to be online to read _before_ downloading and installing.  Essentially I
      wasn't able to get any meaningful impression of what the tool would
      actually be like to use.

    * Specific things I'd like to have from a docs point of view: more detailed
      descriptions of how to use dub as a consumer of packages, how to handle
      both user-local and system-wide install of dub packages, a clear
      description of _where_ it puts user- and system-wide installed packages
      (and how to customize that), how to use packages once installed (and how
      to do so with different D compilers), how to update and uninstall packages.

      If anyone wants to enlighten me in this thread, I'd really appreciate it
      (actually some of these questions have already been answered in other
      threads), but I also think that info needs to be on the dub website. :-)

At the moment I'm a bit committed to other things but I might have a go at 
turning Dgraph into a dub package just to see how it goes.  Should be a nice 
usability test. :-)

Best wishes,

     -- Joe