Wannabe contributor frustrations

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 2/10/16 6:30 PM, Márcio Martins wrote:
> I decided to try a couple ideas in druntime and followed this
> http://wiki.dlang.org/Starting_as_a_Contributor#Fetch_dmd_from_GitHub
>
> Everything went fast and smooth - I have a custom built dmd version.
> Bootstrapping and building dmd was suspiciously fast - took around 15
> secs maybe, if I remember right,
>
>
> I did my changes to druntime, rebuilt with make -f posix.mak
>
> Compiled a test case with ../dmd/src/dmd test.d, but my changes were not
> reflected.
>
> So, I double check I actually did recompile druntime and look for the
> output lib files, and immediately thought that it must be picking up the
> system include and lib paths instead of this development env.
>
> I create a dmd.conf in ../dmd/src right next to my custom dmd binary,
> but still doesn't work.
> I try again invoking ../dmd/src/dmd -conf=../dmd/src/dmd.conf but still
> nothing.
> I try passing the -I and -L arguments in the command line but still it
> is not using my custom druntime.
>
> At this point I flip the table and give up - what could I be doing wrong?
>
> My expectation was that given I followed the official "tutorial"
> closely, everything was going to just work, instead I spent about 2
> hours on this and got nowhere...
>
> dmd should have a verbose mode where it outputs what it's trying to do
> and with which settings, so I could have a chance at seeing what I have
> messed up, and what linker command it is invoking, ... as it is, I felt
> totally in the dark, and that just adds to the frustration.
>
> I am on Ubuntu 15 and got a system-wide dmd installed from the official
> .deb package.

Hi Márcio, thanks for reaching out. You actually did everything right 
and you succeeded. The only thing missing is a misunderstanding that 
I'll fix in the document.

That page is meant for folks who want to change dmd, phobos, or 
druntime. With your setup, if you make a change to druntime and rebuild 
it (and phobos), the change _will_ be reflected properly. E.g. put an 
assert(0); in some unittest and see it failing. This is because all 
paths to dmd, druntime, phobos are set up properly in the makefiles.

However, when you tried to compile some independent program outside 
these, indeed your system defaults entered in action. You need a 
different command line for those, which I'll specify in 
http://wiki.dlang.org/Starting_as_a_Contributor.


Thanks,

Andrei