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

[Brad Anderson]

On Wednesday, 11 September 2013 at 15:01:37 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> On 2013-09-11 13:30, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
>
>> Right now it is a pure development tool. It would be very nice 
>> to have
>> end user installs somehow supported (either by directly 
>> installing
>> application packages or by generating OS specific packages 
>> such as DEB
>> or RPM). But since this enters a highly operating specific 
>> area and goes
>> into direct competition with the OS package manager, I think 
>> it needs a
>> lot of thought and caution to be generally useful and not 
>> possibly do
>> more harm than good in the end. But yes, it should be a 
>> primary goal in
>> my opinion, too.
>
> I'm thinking this type of package manager should be a 
> development tool as well. But there are a lot of development 
> tools that are executables and not just libraries. Think of 
> your documentation generator. Without having looked at it I 
> would assume it's an executable. I have myself a tool, DStep, 
> which translate C headers to D modules. This is an executable 
> as well.


I have to completely disagree with you here.  Where would it end? 
  Would it install vim for me?  Install the Java VM so it could 
run some Java tool?  The level of effort needed to add this 
functionality—which would duplicate dozens of existing package 
management systems that already do this job well—is not worth it 
(and that's before you even consider the amount of effort that 
would be needed to maintain such a system).

dub handles source libraries and handles them well (for such a 
young project).  There is no need to make it do everything and I 
think trying to would be detrimental.