An open question to Rebuild users

[Howard Berkey]

I use rebuild only through dsss, for what it is worth.  And I use dsss every day I do anything with D, more or less.

Howard

Gregor Richards Wrote:

> Judging by the amount of feedback I receive on rebuild, vs the amount of 
> feedback I receive on DSSS, I'd say that 95% of rebuild users are not 
> DSSS users. That is, there are more users who use rebuild alone than in 
> tandem with DSSS. I could be wrong - maybe DSSS just has no bugs :).
> 
> Rebuild was designed primarily to complement DSSS, and DSSS was designed 
> to be the ideal replacement for 'make' and pals for D, so I find it a 
> bit disconcerting that a tool I designed primarily to be a background 
> tool is being used as a primary development tool by so many.
> 
> So, the obvious question is: Why? Why use rebuild and not DSSS? I 
> imagine there must be some misconceptions about DSSS, what it is, what 
> it's for, et cetera.
> 
> I imagine some common misconceptions are:
> 
>   * DSSS is intended solely to be D's answer to CPAN - that is, a 
> network installation tool. This just isn't true, the net portion is only 
> a small chunk of what DSSS can do.
> 
>   * DSSS provides no advantages over using just a build tool. Also not 
> true - even if DSSS provided /only/ a convenient build configuration 
> file format (dsss.conf), that would be a sizable advantage of rebuild. 
> DSSS provides much more, however, including easy generation of libraries 
> with associated .di files, installation, documentation, etc, etc. If you 
> really want your rebuild profile for an application or library be 
> portable, you would need to either have several Makefiles or response 
> files wrapped around rebuild (nasty), or use DSSS (nice).
> 
>   * DSSS is not portable to Windows. I think most people know that I'm 
> not a Windows user, and Windows is mostly a foreign environment to me. 
> However, this is not true. I've done my best, and am very responsive to 
> bug reports, and DSSS does indeed work on Windows just as well as it 
> does on Posix systems.
> 
>   * `dsss` is hard to type. Well, I've typed it more than a dozen times 
> in this post, and my left ring finger is in no particular pain :)
> 
> If your concern or concept isn't noted here, please tell me / ask me! If 
> DSSS /isn't/ everything you need it to be, help me /make/ it what you 
> need it to be :).
> 
>   - Gregor Richards