Official dub packages for Debian and Ubuntu

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Tuesday, 12 April 2016 at 07:03:44 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> [...]
>
> If the Debian ldc2 compiler is crashing on the same source that 
> gdc compiles that sounds like a packaging problem. Or use of 
> outdated D? ldc is generally much more up to date that gdc so 
> shouldn't the order be ldc | gdc | d-compiler?

I didn't get it to compile properly with LDC, which might of 
course have been due to the outdated LDC version in Debian and 
Ubuntu at that time.
Also, GDC is available for more architectures and wasn't stuck in 
unstable at the time dub was packaged.

> On Debian Sid ldc2 is 2.068.2 and gdc doesn't advertise which 
> version of D it is.

Should be D2, there doesn't seem to be much D1 code around 
anymore...

> I assume that the DMD package from dlang, or better d-apt, sets 
> the d- compiler property. Should dmd be prefered if it is 
> present?

I think so, since when installing it from non-free 3rd-party 
sources, the user made an explicit choice for DMD.
In terms of packaging, the packaging doesn't really care, any D 
compiler will satisfy the requirements of the dub package.

>> > And has dub's config been tweaked accordingly in terms of 
>> > which compiler it prefers to use ... ?
>> I didn't touch that, since dub seems to automatically find the 
>> right compiler. The preference seems to be dmd >> gdc >> ldc2, 
>> which looks sane to me.
>
> Sane, yes, but dmd → ldc2 → gdc is probably a better choice 
> simply because ldc tends to be more up to date than gdc – this 
> is not a maintainer problem just a release flow problem.

I can't comment on that... In any case, users and packagers can 
choose whatever D compiler they prefer, there is no "enforcement" 
of any kind happening (just default choices).

>> It's really bad that GDC isn't part of the official GCC yet, 
>> and the standard libraries differ so much between the 
>> compilers (mainly due to phobos progressing very quickly).
>
> GDC is definitely ipart of the GCC thanks to Iain's ongoing 
> efforts, with support from others. GDC would not be in the 
> Debian repository if it wasn't part of GCC.

That's unfortunately not the case. If you download 
gcc-5_5.3.1.orig.tar.gz from 
https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/gcc-5 , you can see that 
GDC was manually inserted. I think the problem might lie in the 
GDC frontend code not being subjected to the FSF CLA, but that's 
just a guess - Iain likely knows more :)

> The problem here is that the Fedora GCC packagers package 
> GCC-Go but do not package GDC. This means GDC is not present in 
> any of Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Scientific Linux.
>
> The last on this list is more important than you might think.

Coming from a scientific background, I am with you on this... 
Problem again is that gccgo is part of GCC, so you just need to 
enable it, while gdc is out-of-tree.

> Also the ldc package in Rawhide is only 0.16.1 which is really 
> rather ancient.

Jup - to be honest, I think the state of the free compilers in 
Linux distributions is really something which is limiting D the 
most at time.
New programming languages like Rust have it much easier in that 
regard.

>> For Debian Stretch I assume the situation will be much better
>> though :-) (given the state of the LDC and GDC Git repos).
>
> I think the policy simply has to be to make sure that LDC and 
> GDC are as up to date as possible in Sid ­– which already 
> happens

Jup - ideally, the Debian D team would give some advice on 
default compilers and versions. But that team seems to be dead.

> – and in Fedora Rawhide – which no-one but me seems to think is 
> important.

Ideally find a Fedora developer (who ideally also works on RHEL) 
and convince him. The easiest way to get the compiler in would be 
a killer application written in D which requires an up-to-date 
toolchain. E.g. Docker is written in Go, many people want Docker, 
so Go is up-to-date (that's over-simplified, but it generally 
works that way...).

Cheers,
     Matthias