Git, the D package manager

[Mathias LANG via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 2 February 2015 at 21:55:21 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> I've long thought that it some point, dub would be forced to 
> support
> arbitrary build systems in order to actually work in the 
> general case. There
> are far too many special cases and more complicated things that 
> build
> scripts and the like frequently have to deal with for dub's 
> simple approach
> to work in many cases. Just look at what something like cmake 
> it can do. It
> blows dub out of the water when it comes to power.
>
> The fact that we have package management via dub is great, and 
> the way it
> builds stuff works for many common cases (especially when 
> you're talking
> about libraries), but I really don't think that its build 
> system is powerful
> enough for the long run. I doubt that Sonke has time to deal 
> with it given
> how much is on his plate, but we really need to look at making 
> it so that
> dub supports a much more powerful build system - possibly even 
> making it so
> that it can support projects building with existing build 
> systems such as
> cmake. I'm sure that that sort of thing comes with its own 
> types of
> problems, but what dub does right now is just too simplistic.
>
> A prime example that I've wondered about is how to deal with 
> cases where you
> need to create a C or C++ wrapper for something and use it in 
> your project.
> If dub supported makefiles, then that would be trivial, but as 
> it stands, it
> can't do anything even close to that. Anything that's C or C++ 
> has to
> already be built no the target system, be in a standard 
> position for the
> linker to find it, etc., or you can't use it in a dub project. 
> Given our
> need for C/C++ compatability, I think that that's a serious 
> flaw. Dub is
> new, and we've gotten by thus far with what it can do, but if 
> it's going to
> really be our standard build system for D, it needs to improve 
> by quite a
> bit.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I think it's the moment to point out the latest P.R. merged into 
dub:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dub/pull/489

It does support Makefiles in a way (prebuiltcommand), but I agree 
it's rather simplistic.