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

Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Apr 11 06:48:43 PDT 2017


On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 13:43:38 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2017-04-11 02:47, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
>> Honestly, I don't see how it really makes much sense to use 
>> shared libraries
>> with D except in cases where you have no choice. The lack of 
>> ABI
>> compatibility makes them almost useless.
>>
>> 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.
>
> I agree, I don't see any point in distributing libraries. just 
> applications. But I do know some people will refuse to install 
> anything that doesn't come through the system package manager.

Every single bit of software that is available in the 
distribution needs to be packaged in it so you can replicate its 
build using only what is available in the distro. Fetching things 
from the internet is not allowed.
(That's actually a hard no in the policy, while other things like 
the use of static linking are rather "you shouldn't do it if you 
can avoid it")

The fundamental thing a distribution does is integrating software 
and creating a consistent whole out of many moving parts. In 
order to do that, you absolutely can not rely on site-specific 
package managers like pip, dub, npm, etc. as they are not built 
for that purpose and only see their own ecosystem.
You could still build with them though in case they integrate 
well with the distro.


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