[Issue 16746] Please output Makefile-style depfiles for ninja and make

[via Digitalmars-d-bugs]

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16746

--- Comment #12 from Matthias Klumpp <matthias at tenstral.net> ---
(In reply to Vladimir Panteleev from comment #11)
> (In reply to Matthias Klumpp from comment #10)
> > Because the wrapper is not available everywhere, and going through a wrapper
> > in order to fix a missing thing in dmd is just a workaround. DMD(FE) should
> > be able to do this natively.
> > When adding support to Meson/CMake/Automake/Makefiles, telling users that
> > they need the compiler but also this other tool which - in the Meson world -
> > has the sole purpose of supplying a missing functionality in DMD is pretty
> > cumbersome. It's a workaround, but no real solution to the issue.
> 
> I'm not sure about referring to a requested feature as "missing
> functionality", but thanks for the clarification.
> 
> Regardless, we will hopefully one day have rdmd as part of dmd itself, or
> use the compiler as a library, so duplicating functionality in both dmd and
> rdmd right now does not look very appealing; until then, you may want to
> look into more pragmatic solutions, such as using rdmd.

Sounds really good, but AFAIK this is still in the far future...
GDC supports writing depfiles properly, and having this feature in DMD would
enable it for DMD and LDC at the same time, making depfiles work for all D
compilers.

> > At the moment, Debian/Uhuntu/Fedora/OpenSUSE and probably a couple of other
> > don't ehip rdmd at all, which makes demanding it just to work around this
> > bug not worthwile anyway.
> 
> I think rdmd should be shipped in the same package as dmd. This is how the
> binary packages from dlang.org for all platforms are. Picking and choosing
> which utilities the distribution considers useful will inevitably lead to
> confusion and a poorer user experience.

Usually in distributions we package just the minimal amount of things necessary
to compile a certain leaf package (e.g. all the stuff one needs to compile
Vibe.d/Tilix/...) and more is added when another package requires the feature.
At the moment, nothing uses rdmd, and adding it would mean someone would need
to maintain the package over the lifetime of the distro release.

Personally I try to avoid taking on new packages on a "could be useful" basis,
because the time I can invest in maintenance is limited, and it's better to
have fewer well-supported packages than lots of them which are poorly
maintained.
(Team maintenance helps a lot with this, but only if the team is actually big
enough, which isn't the case in with D yet).

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