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

[rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d]

On 11/04/2017 3:21 PM, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 14:04:44 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
>> [...]
>> /usr/share/source/D/package-name-version
>>
>> Add a search path like that to Dub and create source only library
>> packages and that is pretty much all the distribution we need for
>> libraries I reckon.
>
> It's more likely that the path would be `/usr/include/d` because that's
> the place the D sources seem to usually reside, especially if they are
> also used as "headers" for shared libraries.
>
> At time I am playing around with the idea of using pkg-config[1] files
> to enlist the sources a D library consists of.
> By doing that, we would have a very build-system agnostic way of doing
> storing that information that can be used by Automake (native), Dub,
> Meson and even plain Makefiles. It's also very widely used (although it
> is commonly not used to list sources).
>
> This would also jive really well with the existing D packages in Debian
> and we could - if we go down the source-only route - still decide to
> precompile a few selected libraries, for example in case they are very
> time consuming to compile or really large.
>
> This will *not* solve the issues with Phobos breakage though, as Phobos
> is a shared library. But doing that would pretty much work around all
> other problems, except for the cost of having statically linked
> binaries, but that seems to be inevitable anyway given the state of things.
>
> (Disclaimer: This is not a D team policy draft yet, just an opinion at
> the moment that might be refined or changed entirely)
>
> [1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/

The problem with /usr/include/d is that is where .di files would be 
located not .d. This would also match up with the c/c++ usage of it.