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

[David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 22:36:39 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> All the regression fixes and none of the bugs!

That's an interesting approach (spoken with British language 
sensibilities).

Is anybody using GDC on a big "modern" D2 codebase 
(metaprogramming-heavy, …) right now? From my experience with 
Thrift, Weka, and so on, even regression fixes have a habit of 
breaking that sort of code in weird and wonderful ways. And 
that's not even mentioning other improvements/fixes/additions 
people might be relying on.

Right now, the frontend version serves as a convenient aid for 
users to navigate those issues (apart, of course, from us trying 
to improve things by making semantic analysis more deterministic, 
etc). If something works on DMD 2.072.2, then users can also 
expect it to work on the corresponding LDC version as well. I'm 
not sure you are helping anybody by introducing another set of 
weird in-between versions.

  — David