patched phobos and phobos_ext

[David Wilson]

On 02/10/2007, UB <ugis.baumanis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is anybody interested in patched phobos and phobos_ext ( Tango's (?)
> containers, ..., etc.), if Walter and Tango guys has nothing against it?

I would be greatly interested in a distribution of Phobos that
includes critical fixes (threading, GC, etc.) with minimal functional
enhancements. Someone recently mentioned having a definitive patch
list for Phobos; I think that at least is a great idea.

What I really believe D needs is a Phobos distribution ala. Net-Phobos
like Netqmail is for Qmail. If you're not familiar with that situation
- the Qmail author produced an excellent body of code, but has a
policy of keeping it incredibly traditional, such as not using
"errno.h", which causes the build to break on many modern C libraries
that virtualize the actual "errno" symbol.

Net-Qmail contains the minimal fixes required to restore Qmail
functionality in a modern environment, and as such has become the de
facto Qmail distribution. People trust it because they know it barely
deviates from the official source code.

Specifically I believe it would be a grand mistake to extend or
functionally modify Phobos in any way - if you expect any community
uptake as opposed to Yet Another Runtime.

GDC also made its own modifications to Phobos. It would be interesting
to enumerate them and try to provide a unified distribution - if
possible you might expect excellent uptake.


> The main idea (from users' point of view) is download source code from dsource
> (?),
> and build locally phobos and phobos_ext.

-1 for phobos_ext

> With your help I am ready to spend some time on this.

I think a patched distribution is a great idea and low-hanging fruit.
The patches already exist, all that needs done is creation of a
patched archive, documenting which patches were included, and a
reasonable amount of QA. (One bad release and people will begin to
lose trust).

Again I stress I believe it would be a grave mistake to extend Phobos.
There are enough "standard libraries" as it is. :)

Thanks,


David.