Official dub packages for Debian and Ubuntu

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Tuesday, 12 April 2016 at 01:58:13 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> On Monday, 11 April 2016 at 21:58:55 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
> Wakeling wrote:
>> Related note: I see the lcd version in xenial is 0.17.0~beta2 
>> -- I don't suppose there's any chance of upgrading that to the 
>> stable 0.17.1 release ... ?  (Not asking you to do it 
>> personally, just wondering if that's something that could be 
>> achieved.)
>
> I can ask, but given that the Xenial final freeze is on 24. 
> April (release on 26.) and changing compiler versions that late 
> in the cycle is potentially dangerous, I guess there is only a 
> slim chance of success... On the pro-side is that having a beta 
> compiler in the LTS release is undesirable, but even then I 
> need to find an Ubuntu developer who does have time to do the 
> sync and get the feature-freeze-exception. LDC FTBFSing on 
> armel in Debian (and not entering testing due to that at time) 
> is also an issue :-/

Ouch :-(  Well, if you are happy to look into it, that would be 
great -- no pressure, though. :-)

I get the point about not updating compilers late in the 
development cycle, but this update is likely to produce a better 
package and I can't see it triggering any other package rebuilds 
beyond the LDC phobos/druntime packages.

BTW, the package description for ldc, in both Debian and Ubuntu, 
is insanely out of date: it reads,

    LDC already compiles a lot of D code, but should still be
    considered beta quality. Take a look at the tickets to get
    a better impression on what still needs to be implemented.

... which AFAICT is unchanged from something like 5+ years ago, 
when the ldc packaged in Debian/Ubuntu was a D1-only compiler 
still in heavy development.

> There is no real policy, at least I have found none. But from 
> my tests, ldc simply crashed right away when trying to compile, 
> later it wasn't able to process some code gdc had no problems 
> with (I haven't tried the upcoming release). Since the GNU 
> Compiler Collection is Debian's default compiler, I have set 
> the compiler dependency of dub to gdc | ldc | d-compiler, so 
> gdc is preferred, but replacing it with any other compiler will 
> work too.

That's very odd.  What were you trying to build ... ?

> 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.

Yea, sounds good.

Related note: would it be viable in principle to get dmd itself 
into Debian and Ubuntu repositories via (respectively) non-free 
and multiverse ... ?  Again, not asking you to do the work, but 
just curious based on your experience of being a Debian packager.

> For Debian Stretch I assume the situation will be much better 
> though :-) (given the state of the LDC and GDC Git repos).

Looking forward to it :-)  And, thank you again!