DSSS and multiple intermingled environments

[Johan Granberg]

Gregor Richards wrote:

> DSSS seems to be getting a lot of flak recently because it's not
> particularly happy being used with multiple versions of DMD, GDC, etc
> all layered together.
> 
> This is hardly fair to DSSS. Detecting such situations is an
> arbitrary-complexity problem, and DSSS can never really know what has
> been changed under it. It can make some reasonable guesses, but since
> IMHO those would usually been wrong, I've erred on the side of
> ignorance. That is, if you're going to change DSSS' underlying
> compilation environment, it anticipates that you will consider the
> consequences and `dsss distclean` first.

I don't think distclean should never be a solution. Wouldn't it be better if
there was a way to specify separate locations for binaries for the
different compiler/stdlib combinations in the dsss.conf file?
(gdc-phobos-bin,dmd-tango-bin,etc...)

Personally i consider the need to remove object files before a build a bug
in the build system and try to write makefiles (or other commandfiles) to
not require any make clean or similar.

> I don't know whether this situation will improve. To be honest, I hardly
> consider the fact that DSSS is not psychic a bug. As I already said,
> it's not something that can be fixed magically, it's actually quite
> complex. If you're going to be forcing DSSS to jump through multiple
> environments, just clean up after yourself.
> 
> Do a `dsss distclean` before building with a different compiler.
> 
>   - Gregor Richards

ps. while we already are talking dsss deficiencies will it be possible to
run your own repositories (think of how git works) and specify in the
dsss.conf that this lib is from here and that lib from there etc ... ?