dub: JSON, SDL, YAML, TOML, what color should we paint it ?

[Mathias LANG]

On Tuesday, 28 February 2023 at 16:32:42 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote:
> On Tuesday, 28 February 2023 at 16:10:19 UTC, Steven 
> Schveighoffer wrote:
>> module buildfile;
>
> This isn't what I'm talking about at all.
>
> I don't want to run D to build, I want to *introspect* D for 
> build info. You can read module names, dependencies (including 
> platform-specific and configuration-specific ones) right out of 
> D code. Author, description, license, etc., have standard ddoc 
> sections in D code.
>
> Other things dub.json define like flags could easily be a UDA 
> on the module declaration and be pulled out pretty easily by 
> compilers or even relatively basic parsers.
>
> Even subconfigurations can... kinda be pulled out of D code by 
> looking for version blocks though that's probably another thing 
> I'd put on a UDA.

On paper it sounds quite good, but I am not sure how well it 
works to derive the build instructions from the thing you are 
trying to build. Most of the time, when I build something, it 
fails. It's quite obvious why: Build something new, it will fail 
for a reason or another. Fix it, rebuild, and it either pass, or 
you discover another error. Things do succeed on the first try on 
some occasions, but the number of time they don't is much higher.

How do you ensure your build system is resilient in the presence 
of wrong modules ? How do you ensure that build system errors are 
not replaced by linker / compilation errors ?