The D ecosystem in Debian with free-as-in-freedom DMD

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 22:26:46 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
wrote:
> On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 13:20:00 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
>> This has worked nicely for every language. If you don't have 
>> templates in your API or don't change the templates between 
>> releases, you can survive with one library for a long time.
>
> But the vast majority of D libraries _do_ have templates 
> (starting with Phobos).  How should this situation be dealt 
> with?
>
> How does Debian deal with, e.g., fixes to the templated code in 
> Boost, which impact on other packages built using those 
> header-only libraries?

Boost's soversion is changed on every release, and the version is 
included in it's -dev package as well. That's why we have 
libboost1.62-dev: 
https://packages.debian.org/de/sid/libboost1.62-dev (and possibly 
more).
There is also a boost-defaults package setting the current 
default Boos version for packages to depend on.
If a new Boost comes out, it's soversion and -dev package name 
changes, triggering a package transition and subsequently a full 
rebuild of all stuff depending on Boost.

Doing something like this with D libraries would obviously be 
possible as well.