String import an entire directory

[Andre Pany]

On Monday, 13 November 2017 at 09:27:10 UTC, Adrian Matoga wrote:
> On Saturday, 11 November 2017 at 14:11:50 UTC, Neia Neutuladh 
> wrote:
>> At my job, I put together a database migration tool for our 
>> services. It scans for resources in your JAR file with an 
>> appropriate path, interprets them as SQL scripts, and applies 
>> them to the database if it hasn't been done yet.
>>
>> I want to implement this in D. However, while D allows you to 
>> import individual files, it doesn't let you import an entire 
>> directory.
>>
>> I can make a prebuild script to generate code for this, but 
>> I'm wondering: do other people find themselves needing this 
>> periodically? If so, I can write a DIP for it, or at least 
>> publish a codegen tool that other people can use.
>
> Why do you want to import files at compile time? Why can't it 
> be done in run time, by simply reading directory with 
> dirEntries and opening std.stdio.File for each one?

Three is a use case. I have an application which should be 
translated into different languages. I created a texts.prop file. 
The language department will create texts_en.prop, texts_de.prop 
and so on. The language department will create GIT pull requests 
which will cause the build infrastructure to recompile my 
application. Any new text_**.prop should be automatically 
included in the build process.

There is an advantage and a disadvantage of using import for this 
scenario. The advantage is, it was really easy to implement and 
in case I use non existing text keys in the coding, there is a 
compiler time error.
But there is a major downside, although nothing is changed in any 
file, dub will every time recompile my application. Also my 
rather small application takes 4 seconds to compile due to this 
logic.

Therefore I tend to reimplement the logic using a dub pre build 
script.

Kind regards
Andre