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

[Gerald via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 12:47:13 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> So why bother, no Rust people will use it, they just use Cargo 
> and it gets stuff for them. Why bother packaging anything when 
> people will not use it? All you need to have a working Rust 
> system on Debian is curl and bash.

Users of an application written in Rust are not developers, they 
just want to install an app using whatever packaging mechanism 
the distro provides. Also, I would expect that the source library 
packages for Rust are likely just a build dependency and users 
are not building Rust binaries on their system. This is just a 
way for the Debian packagers to build packages and track 
dependencies using the tools and processes they already have in 
place.

Having said that, I don't disagree with you as I think it's a bit 
silly to replicate what cargo, maven and dub already provide OOTB 
and essentially duplicate their existing repositories. However, 
if Rust is going in this direction it can make sense for D to 
follow and just make the necessary improvements in Dub to support 
the process.