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

[Jacob Carlborg via Digitalmars-d]

On 2017-04-11 14:56, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:

> That's basically what's required with D. It is not ABI compatible across
> releases, and while ABI compatibility might be nice, it really isn't
> reasonable with D - especially with how attributes work and how template
> heavy D code is. If the D compiler gets upgraded, then anything that gets
> built needs everything that it depends on to have been built with that exact
> compiler version.
>
> But if we just use dub - which _is_ the official packaging and build tool -
> then we avoid these issues. Ideally, the compiler and dub would be part of
> the distro, but libraries don't need to be. And it sounds like that's
> basically how the Go and Rust folks want to function as well. So, it would
> make sense for these languages to simply not have their libraries be
> included in distros. The build tools are plenty.

I agree, but I think that they want to avoid having packages that 
require dependencies outside of the Debian tree to build. That is, a 
user end application written in D, that is built using Dub. To solve 
that and still use Dub they would need to package the dependent 
libraries as source packages and somehow point Dub to the library in the 
Debian tree and not code.dlang.org. I don't see why that wouldn't be 
possible and if anything needs to be changed in Dub for that, I think 
that's reasonable.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg