LDC 1.8.0

[Matthias Klumpp]

On Thursday, 29 March 2018 at 08:10:11 UTC, Martin Tschierschke 
wrote:
> On Saturday, 24 March 2018 at 17:33:18 UTC, Matthias Klumpp 
> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 13 March 2018 at 01:52:48 UTC, Matthias Klumpp 
>> wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> Aww, just a little bit too late to easily get into Ubuntu 
>>> 18.04 LTS
>>
>> Well.... It still made it, yay! (Even without me explicitly 
>> requesting it)
>> This means Ubuntu 18.04 will be pretty up-to-date when it 
>> comes to D stuff, only GDC 8 won't be the default (but still 
>> available).
>> The thing that is facilitating an up-to-date D stack in Debian 
>> and Ubuntu is software in the archive using D. The Tilix 
>> terminal emulator is at the forefront there, followed by my 
>> appstream-generator and the Laniakea archive management suite 
>> and all the bits and pieces those projects depend on (like 
>> GtkD in Tilix' case).
>
> This is very cool! Will DMD become part of Ubuntu, too?

No, it's too late for that and adding DMD to Debian (and thereby 
Ubuntu) would be a significant amount of work.
For compiling D code in Debian/Ubuntu, we will pretty much always 
use LDC or GDC, because we want stronger optimization and better 
architecture support, while compilation time doesn't matter at 
all.
That being said, with DMD being under a completely free license 
now, the only thing that is preventing it from being in Debian is 
lack of manpower in the D team (having it would be very useful!).
So, if anyone is interested in helping out with maintaining 
compiler packages, D libraries or tools, please join the Debian D 
team![1].
You don't have to be a Debian developer to help, but you should 
ideally be somewhat familiar with Debian's policies and 
packaging. Me or others in the D team who are Debian developers 
can review the changes and sponsor them into the Debian and 
Ubuntu archives.

Since Ubuntu 18.04 LTS releases this April, getting DMD in that 
release will be almost impossible (feature freeze is very soon), 
but we could have it in Ubuntu 18.10, if someone creates packages 
for it.

[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/d-team/ - get a guest account: 
https://signup.salsa.debian.org/