D, Dub, Debian, Fedora

[Paul O'Neil via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 19 January 2015 at 14:48:32 UTC, Russel Winder via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Has anyone been in contact with Debian and Fedora packagers to 
> see if
> using Dub as a build system is acceptable to them for 
> packaging? I know
> Debian folk still prefer Autotools, but accept Make or SCons 
> (but
> definitely not Waf).
>
> My suspicion is that Debian will deem it not acceptable, but 
> this is
> just suspicion, based on the problems they have with Gradle and 
> Maven.
>

I also suspect that Debian won't like using another build tool,
but it may not be a fatal objection.  Here's what their wiki says
about Hadoop:

Debian currently does not include Hadoop packages. There are a
number of reasons for this; in particular the Hadoop build
process will load various dependencies via Maven instead of using
distribution-supplied packages. Java projects like this are
unfortunately not easy to package because of interdependencies;
and unfortunately the Hadoop stack is full of odd dependencies
(including Apache Forrest, which for a long time only worked with
Java = 1.5).

It may not be too much effort to make a "dub-debian" tool that
takes a dub package and builds it using Debian packages, or sets
up an unbuilt source package that they would find acceptable.  A
potential challenge here is mapping between dub and Debian
packages that do the same thing.  There is a "dub build --nodeps"
flag that prevents dub from downloading a building dependencies,
kind of turning dub into make.  So if we could automate finding
the right Debian packages for dependencies and those put their
stuff into the default search paths, then maybe we can use dub to
drive compilation and nothing else.  I'll add this to my TODO
list.

--
Paul O'Neil
Github / IRC: todayman