Developing a plan for D2.0: Getting everything on the table

[Anders F Björklund]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I suggest anyone who wants to do something for D to focus on the 
> installation aspect. It's a relatively well-defined project of high 
> importance and high visibility. We simply can't afford to introduce D to 
> the world without a state-of-the-art installation procedure.

I made some installers for the DMD 1.00 introduction, but back then
the .zip (or the missing .tgz) were still the preferred procedure...
http://www.algonet.se/~afb/d/dmd-setup.html for Windows
http://www.algonet.se/~afb/d/rpm-setup.html for Linux

So the installers were only used for the portable D compiler (gdc)
in the complementary gdcwin/gdcgnu/gcmac projects. The dgcc upstream
always used .tar.bz2, similar to how dmd used .zip for the releases.
But with proper documentation, it wasn't *that* much extra hassle...


Going through the installation wizards is more "familiar", but
probably not less work than going through the install steps with
unzip, cp, chmod and $PATH and whatnot, with the contributions at:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?D__Tutorial/InstallingDCompiler

I like having installers myself, but it seemed like install problems
were mostly given as "yet another excuse" to not try the D language.
Even with the dmd/gdc installers, you'd get the "where's the IDE" or
"where's the GUI" so it's mostly about documentation and presentation ?


I won't do any dmd2/ldc installers myself I think, but will keep the
dmd1/gdc installers up for as long as there seems to be interest...

Should probably update the SF web pages with the new information on
the development of D, since currently they all date back to 2008.

--anders