An open question to Rebuild users

[Gregor Richards]

Jesse Phillips wrote:
> is rebuild and bud really competing? I just thought rebuild was just
> trying to but the il back in bud. No seriously, I thought it just
> a modified bud to work more closely with dsss. I suppose I should ask what
> is the benefits to rebuild to bud? Was it Gregor's intent to fork bud as a
> competitor? And maybe what prevents bud from having that which is added to
> rebuild?

Well, here's the honest truth behind why rebuild exists. Some may find 
it offensive, but I assure you it's just brutally honest :)

I originally wrote DSSS to work with bu[il]d. The reason was simple: Why 
rock the boat? However, even the first revision of DSSS ended up needing 
a branch of bu[il]d, because it was broken on GDC.

OK, so I posted fixes, and the next version worked on GDC (sort of), but 
it was broken (as I recall) on DMD+GNU/Linux.

*sigh*, OK, fine. I kept my branch up to date while also having it 
changed enough to actually work everywhere. However, I also needed new 
features, like shared library support and cross-compilation support.

Two threads on bu[il]d's forum, both went nowhere fast.

At this point, I was spending far more time working /around/ bu[il]d 
than I was working /with/ bu[il]d. However, I persisted because I 
figured everybody used bu[il]d for a reason.

But then I started talking about it on IRC, and what did I discover? 
Nearly everyone I talked to who was either using GDC or trying to do 
anything more complex than .d file -> binary was unhappy with bu[il]d.

So, tired of munging with my branch, I abandoned it and wrote rebuild. I 
based rebuild on DMD's frontend because there was no D parser in D that 
worked well and was portable.

Rebuild supports shared object files, it supports cross-compilation. 
Also, it has the -oq option, which gives object files fully-qualified 
names. That's quite helpful for Posix ar-style libraries. Most of these 
features I added to meld it with DSSS, but they're certainly not useless 
in isolation.

In short: If you use bu[il]d and have never had any problem with it, 
there is no reason for you to switch to rebuild. Are they in 
competition? Yes, of course, that's the nature of similar software. But 
they serve the same function, and even do so in a similar way.

Again, with apologies to anyone this offends,

  - Gregor Richards