ldc and gdc

[Christian Manning]

On 06/08/2011 12:02, Marco Leise wrote:
> Am 06.08.2011, 11:16 Uhr, schrieb Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com>:
>
>> On 2011-08-05 11:53, Marco Leise wrote:
>>> I have noticed DVM around.
>>> The situation on Gentoo is typically that when there are different
>>> versions of the same package, that can be installed in different
>>> 'slots'. A dependency of these packages is a control file for eselect, a
>>> tool to switch between the currently active implementation (OpenJDK, Sun
>>> Java, ...), package version (boost) and several other system
>>> configuration options. 'python' for example ends up as a symlink to
>>> either python2.7 or python3.1 and there are corresponding directory
>>> names for the libraries. It would be ideal if dmd was a symlink to
>>> either dmd1 or dmd2 and they would both use a separate dmd.conf. But
>>> since the source code is available for a while now that should be easy
>>> to make possible.
>>> I have never used DVM, but I imagine it works like Maven or the Eclipse
>>> updater. So it would download precompiled compilers and libraries into
>>> the user's home directory, right? With Gentoo being a source
>>> distribution it is usually avoided to download binaries from the
>>> internet so I guess DVM would be one of two options to install D
>>> compilers on Gentoo. The difference in usage would be like this for an
>>> installation:
>>> dvm: "dvm install 1.068"
>>> portage: "emerge =dmd-1.068"
>>> and this for setting the system-wide default compiler:
>>> dvm use 1.068 -d
>>> eselect dmd set dmd1
>>> Granted, the portage version would only allow one dmd 1 compiler to be
>>> installed at a time, but that is ok for most users. I guess in theory
>>> there could even be slots for every single release of dmd. This is
>>> already done for Boost and automake in practice (with major revisions).
>>> OTOH there is no option to set the compiler for the current shell, but
>>> maybe "export DMD=dmd1", "make posix.mak" should work.
>>
>> It seems like DVM and portage/eselect are similar. I think it's a huge
>> advantage to be able to have multiple versions of DMD installed. I use
>> both D1 and D2, (mostly D1). I also think it's especially useful when
>> there's almost always something that breaks in a new release of DMD.
>> Then you can easily go back to an older version if you need to.
>>
>> BTW, Nick Sabalausky is working on making it possible to install DMD
>> from github via DVM.
>
> Even if this begins to sound childish, I have to add for completeness
> sake that in portage you have the version number 9999 to indicate a
> build from online source repositories. So dmd-9999 would be the Github
> version. The source tree is cloned into /usr/portage/distfiles/git-src/
> and updated each time the package is being reinstalled. Additional tools
> like 'smart-live-rebuild' have emerged to make rebuilding changed
> repositories easier.

emerge -1 @live-rebuild is very handy for this if you're on the portage 
alphas.