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

Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Apr 11 05:51:42 PDT 2017


On Tuesday, April 11, 2017 12:40:34 Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 00:47:34 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Monday, April 10, 2017 23:08:17 David Nadlinger via [...]
> > Also, what are we even looking to distribute in debian? I would
> > have thought that the normal thing to do would be to build with
> > dub, in which case, having the compiler and dub be debian
> > packages makes sense but not really anything else. If you're
> > looking to package an application that was written in D, then
> > that becomes another question, but then if you just statically
> > link it, the ABI compatibility problem goes away as does any
> > need to package any D library dependencies.
>
> You will have static-library packages which have the exact same
> ABI issues shared libraries have.
> And yeah, this is obviously about stuff being built with D
> compilers in the distro, such as Tilix, BioD, AppStream Generator
> and all future things which might emerge and be useful to have in
> the OS.

My point was that there really isn't a reason to package D libraries in the
distro. ABI compatibility makes including D libraries in a distro
problematic, and dub takes care dependencies for you, making it completely
unnecessary to include any D libraries in a distro. Now, there may be a
reason to include a D _program_ in a distro, but with a D program, you can
just build it with dub and statically link in its D libraries so that they
don't need to be part of the distro. And if we go that route, you pretty
much avoid this whole mess.

- Jonathan M Davis



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