DMD in Gentoo

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Brad Roberts wrote:

> Anant Narayanan wrote:
>> Brad Roberts wrote:
>>> Great.  The announcement that it's for a specific version is what
>>> tweaked my concern as it's a key aspect of why Walter doesn't allow
>>> redistribution.  He wants users to always get the latest release, not
>>> have old releases living in the wild.  Does this package seek to always
>>> get the most recent version or is it hard coded at those versions?
>> 
>> Unfortunately, our QA policy does not allow such fetching (since the
>> latest version may be broken, which is inconvenient for our users). Any
>> new releases require a new ebuild to be written which guarantees that it
>> works - the build system is not always the same across releases.
>> 
>> However, Gentoo is one of the distributions known for its '0-day
>> releases', as updates to the tree happen very frequently. There shouldn't
>> be a gap of more than
>>  7 days between a new upstream release and a downstream ebuild.
>> 
>> Best Regards,
>> --
>> Anant Narayanan
>> http://www.kix.in/
>> 
>> gpg --recv-keys 0EF6914E
>> <anant at kix.in,gentoo.org,php.net>
> 
> While I really don't want to play Walter's parrot on this issue since
> I'm not sure I agree with it, but by having a fixed version downloader,
> the spirit of the problem is the same.  You're providing a package that
> must be separately maintained or users will get an outdated version.
> That it _can_ be kept up to date is no guarantee that it will, or will
> be on a timely basis.
> 
> Additionally, who is this 'our' that you refer to?  Are you speaking on
> behalf of Gentoo, some other company, the D community?  The attribution
> is unclear.
> 
> At this point, I'm going to step out of the debate and if Walter chooses
> to enforce his redistribution policy that's his call.
> 
> Later,
> Brad

I'm pretty sure 'our' refer to Gentoo, and I find it a sane requirement
given that it has happened more than one time that DMD has been unusable
for a wide range of programs.

Talking on behalf of Tango, we do also recommend particular versions of DMD
(and make these available for download through our agreement with
DigitalMars). These are usually the latest DMD for our snapshot builds, but
given that each revision usually requires a merge into the Tango runtime,
an update of dmd.bin via Gentoo's portage would quite possibly break Tango
if coming in the interim.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango