Git, the D package manager

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, 2015-02-03 at 08:51 +0000, ketmar via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Feb 2015 02:19:55 +0000, Martin Nowak wrote:
> 
> > There seems to be a general scepticism against dub and I wonder what the
> > reasons are.
> 
> 'cause it really sux as a build tool.

I am reminded of some history that this thread has prompted me to write:

I really dislike XML as a human authored format. In 2006 I got so angry
with Ant, I wrote Gant as a way of scripting Ant tasks – the way people
were using XML to create imperative builds was getting just too awful.
Maven has declarative project specification, but if you actually want to
build anything you have to write things in Java. Gant got (friendly)
forked and is now officially the Groovy front end to Ant. Not many users
though. Nor for Gant itself really.

In 2007, Hans Dockter and I tried to use Gant as the basis of a build
framework. It was able to do the job, but it was awkward and we declared
it not a good direction. Hans started from scratch with all the lessons
learned from Gant, Ant and Maven, and with Adam Murdoch, and occasional
input from me, created Gradle. Not quite the Gradle of today, but the
beginnings of what is there today.

Go folk, and I suspect many D folk, will not want to use a JVM-based
build framework even though it has C++ as well as support for JVM
languages.

Clearly there is appetite for a dependency and build framework for D/C
++/C which is fine, Gradle could do it, SCons and CMake probably not.

Many are liking Dub, many are not. Myself, I have doubts, but I haven't
really got stuck in. Perhaps we can surmise that Dub points at a very
good idea for D/C++/C systems, but is not itself it. Mayhap there needs
to be a "child of Dub".

The issue is though that Dub was created because someone did something
rather than just talking (and emailing) about it. As Hans and colleagues
took knowledge and experience and created Gradle, somebody, or group of
people, need to take the practical experience of Make, CMake, Jam,
SCons, Waf, Ant, Gant, Maven, Gradle and Dub, and do something.

I will also say that Bintray and Artifactory may be better
artefact/dependency stores that trying to build something D-specific
from scratch.


-- 
Russel.
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Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
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