DUB - call to arms

[Anton Fediushin]

On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 11:06:56 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
> On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 09:34:00 UTC, Anton Fediushin wrote:
>> I don't have much experience contributing to dub but I have 
>> contributed to dub-registry in the past and must I say, it 
>> wasn't a pleasant experience for me. Everything I'm writing in 
>> this post is from a year ago, I am not sure what's the state 
>> of the ecosystem now.
>>
>> [...]
>
> What issues do you have specific to Dub?
>
> You wrote: it slows down the whole community. This statement is 
> not true. It does not slow me down, actually it is working like 
> a charme for me now (I did a few dub pull requests).
>
> Kind regards
> Andre

It is slowing down the d community because it's not what a 
package manager and a build system of a modern programming 
language should look like. For example, LDC is able to compile 
code for quite a few architectures, even GPUs, yet you cannot 
painlessly integrate that with dub.

As soon as you want to do something slightly unusual, your 
dub.json/dub.sdl becomes a spaghetti of 
preBuildCommands/postBuildCommands. In my personal opinion, 
package file of a high-level build system (which is what dub is 
trying to be) should never contain any shell commands.

And yes, dub.json/dub.sdl is another problem of dub. Having two 
package formats is nothing but a bad decision. Sure, sdl can 
contain comments that are very useful when you are trying to make 
sense of pre/postBuildCommands-spaghetti. This is how one bad 
design decision depends on another. Thing is, it's impossible to 
fix without breaking changes

Best regards,
Anton