Chocolatey Packages for DMD, LDC, and GDC

Manuel Maier mjmaier at gmx.de
Wed Nov 29 21:16:14 UTC 2017


On Wednesday, 29 November 2017 at 16:04:04 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> On 2017-11-28 20:04, Manuel Maier wrote:
>> Another thing I don't think it does is patching the sc.ini 
>> with Visual Studio environment variables, like the dmd 
>> installer does.
>
> No, it basically only extracts the downloaded archive.

That's the one nice thing about the dmd installer, it takes care 
of setting up the default environment for you if it detects 
Visual Studio to be installed. I think this is most useful for 
Windows people coming from Visual Studio who are used to having 
the environment being set up for them.

I myself am one of these people, but I don't entirely endorse the 
way Visual Studio solves this problem. I need to decide to either 
use the Visual Studio GUI, or use one of the "x86 Native Tools 
Command Prompt" links, or seek out the batch file that sets up 
the environment for me. So it basically forces you to choose 
between devenv (which takes a million years to boot) and cmd 
(which is not what I'd call a inconvenient terminal). The only 
other option is to basically emulate the VsDevCmd.bat script and 
manually gather all the necessary info (the very thing the dmd 
installer does if I'm not mistaken).

If you're not using the digital mars linker, you still have those 
age old workflow problems, regardless of whether it's C++ or D. 
And that bugs me quite a bit. I'd love to see a clean solution 
where the developer has the choice of which environment to use, 
can quickly switch between these environments, and is able to put 
them in some kind of manifest to be checked into a git repo or 
something alike to be shared with fellow developers and CI 
systems.

P.S.: Sorry for the ranting...


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