Git, the D package manager

[Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d]

This thread has just made me decide to write a D build system, in 
D and configured in D that builds on dub and its packages intead 
of reinventing the wheel. I might ask the community for inputs on 
requirements. Maybe this will be my DConf 2015 submission.

Also, Dicebot, I agree with nearly everything you said here. It 
tends to happen that I usually either completely agree or 
completely disagree with you ;)

Atila

On Monday, 2 February 2015 at 14:41:00 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> Quick summary of my opinion can look like this:
>
> 1) dub is a horrible build tool
> 2) git submodules is a horrible way for dependency management
>
> First thing is something we can improve on in future and, 
> actually, dub supports using rdmd as a build tool already.
>
> Second thing is an inherent issue that won't change without 
> some fundamental breaking changes in how hit submodules are 
> implemented.
>
> Because of that I am trying to push dub despite the fact I 
> don't like lot of things about it personally.
>
> ----------------------------------------
>
> Explaining why dub is a horrible build tool is hardly necessary 
> - there are plenty of cases in this thread already.
>
> So why git submodules don't really work?
>
> 1) Lack of version management
>
> submodule remembers specific commit hash and that is all. As of 
> recent git version one can also remember remote tracking branch 
> (but it will still keep specific hash in history!)
>
> This may not seem an issue if you have only few dependencies 
> and control them all. But it scales badly once bulding the 
> project needs many incompatible versions of the same dependency 
> and dependency count increases in general.
>
> 2) Lack of local cache
>
> This is really annoying when working with many project with 
> similar dependencies - those will get cloned over and over 
> again, taking quite some time. Can possibly be fixed with 
> clever scripts that replace remotes with local repo paths but 
> that is not out-of-the box solution
>
> 3) Lack of package repository
>
> Biggest thing about dub is not dub tool itself. It is 
> code.dlang.org and what it can become in future. Providing 
> simple centralized way to discover new libraries and quickly 
> try those in uniform matter is the way you build decentralized 
> ecosystem (ironically).
>
> With git submodules you are pretty much stick with doing GitHub 
> search over and over again
>
> 4) Inherently coupled with specific DVCS
>
> git and GitHub are most common (and officially endorsed) ways 
> of version control in D world but those are not the only one. 
> dub registry allows to use GitHub, GitBucket and source tarball 
> packages in the same project - in simple uniform matter. It is 
> a 100% in-house tool that does no depend on decisions of 
> external project maintainers that provides a common API for 
> everything else to interoperate