Make dub part of the standard dmd distribution

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 1 June 2015 at 06:20:18 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Ditto. Dub's great if you let it be your buildsystem, but as 
> soon as you want to use it as a package-manager-only it becomes 
> an uphill battle with dub fighting back every step of the way 
> (I speak from experience). That problem is worse if your 
> project is a library that you want fetchable through dub.

And this is when Jacob Carlborg chimes in and says "I told you 
so." ;) His favorite complaint about dub has always been that it 
combined package management and the build tool into one.

dub works fantastically if you want to do everything in the 
standard way without any funny stuff, but it clearly doesn't have 
the power of a tool like make, cmake, etc. As soon as you need to 
do anything funny - like include anything related to other 
languages in your build, or put things in a specific layout 
because of some company-specific thing, or anything that wasn't 
explicitly planned for by the folks writing dub, dub just won't 
work.

Now, to be fair, I don't know how you can be pulling in all kinds 
of stray libraries with who-knows-what for their build systems 
and expect it to work very well via a single tool (at minimum, 
you have the problem that the machine that you're trying to build 
them on will likely be missing some of those tools), but that's 
pretty much what we need to handle the general case. Without 
that, dub will work great for the normal case (which _will_ be 
plenty for many, many projects), but it won't work in the general 
case - and corporate folks in particular are probably going to 
have to skip out on using it because of abnormal requirements on 
their part.

Even simply splitting dub out so that it can pull in packages 
without necessarily being able to build them would be nice (maybe 
adding a flag to the dub.json file indicating whether dub can be 
used as a build tool for the project or whether it's supposed to 
just act as a package manager for it), though that does add the 
problem of code.dlang.org becoming more confusing, since you 
wouldn't be able to rely on all projects on it being built for 
you by dub as part of the process of grabbing packages.

It's a complicate problem, and dub went a route which works in 
the 90% case, but doesn't work for more complicated cases, which 
will make dub unusable for some projects - especially corporate 
ones. I don't know how fixable it is without a major redesign of 
dub.

- Jonathan M Davis