Practical Problems with distribution D projects

[Dicebot]

On Tuesday, 25 February 2014 at 14:51:48 UTC, Assaf Gordon wrote:
> My target audience is not D developers - it is unix casual 
> users (not even developers).
> I want to make it the easiest for them to use my program.
> If it's requires more than the standard "configure && make && 
> make install" (or the cmake equivalent), then many of them will 
> not do it.

Then push it into distro repositories. You are NOT helping by 
recommending them to do "make install", quite the contrary, 
harming whole ecosystem. Casual users should not be even aware 
that "make install" exists. Being one of package maintainers 
myself I really hate this kind of "helping" attitude, it causes 
only trouble.

>> Single Linux-wide binary distribution is mostly a myth and dmd 
>> shows
>> it by its own.
>
> Not sure what the "myth" is - but a statically-linked binaries 
> work well (if your program is self-contained and properly 
> compiled), and there are many examples of it.

Except you never have truly statically linked binaries, there is 
always at least glibc. You can do it for small set of popular 
distributives, especially when conforming to 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base but it simply 
does not work in general.

Please stop distributing software for Linux with Windows attitude.