Support for 2.064.2

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 12 July 2015 at 17:27, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On 07/12/2015 09:50 AM, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Out of curiosity, how many projects are still supporting D 2.064.2
>> compiler/runtime?  Granted that this is the version shipped in the current
>> Debian Stable and  Ubuntu LTS (which will be supported until 2020).
>>
>> I'm both interested in how much willingness, and how much awareness there
>> are around maintaining versions that are shipped with an OS whose combined
>> market share potentially make up for 50% of all Linux Servers.
>>
>>
> Dunno about Ubuntu, but anyone who uses Debian Stable without pretty much
> *expecting* everything in the repos to be two years behind (and therefore
> needing to occasionally install things manually) is begging for a very rude
> awakening.
>
>
Maybe for normal software/libraries.  But language and toolchain software
is expected to give consistency.  Example, the chances of getting errors
because the compiler is too old when backporting a C/C++ program from
Debian Sid to Jessie are very low.



> Besides, manually grabbing an up-to-date DMD is trivial. And then there's
> DVM, too.
>
> I do very much prefer to support DMDs as far back as I can in my projects,
> and I generally try to, but I often hit situations where continuing to
> support an older DMD (even a mere two versions behind) just isn't
> realistic. (And it becomes even more unrealistic when balanced against the
> ease of manually grabbing a newer DMD and spending merely a few minutes -
> if any - updating a codebase.)
>
> Currently, 2.066.1 is the oldest I'm able to support in the latest
> versions of my projects.
>
>
Cool.  What I'm looking to do (and the Debian/Ubuntu maintainers want as
well) is to start building a D library/program toolchain, as currently
there are only a dozen of D1-ported-to-D2 SDL games.  As a primer, dub,
digger, dscanner, dustmite (maybe dvm too) will be built and shipped in the
repositories - dub being set-up to use GDC as the main compiler.

Something I'd like to avoid, giving a negative impression because some
potential user downloads dub through the apt repositories and can't build
any programs.

I'd also want to have some library documentation generated too, as this is
another thing that occasionally bites new users when they read the latest
documentation and try to use a function that doesn't exist in the
compiler/library they have installed.  I find it really surprising that no
one in the DMD or Phobos camp actually cares about having versioned
documentation (eg: http://ceph.com/docs/master or
https://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest ) - despite it being relatively
trivial to support.

Iain.
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