a cabal for D ?

[Lutger Blijdestijn]

Russel Winder wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 20:44 +0000, Jason E. Aten wrote:
>> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I observe that there doesn't appear
>> to be a package management system / standard repository for D libraries.
>> Or is there?
>> 
>> I'm talking about something as easy to use as R's CRAN,
>> > install.packages("rforest")
>> 
>> or cpan for perl, ctan for latex, dpgk/apt for debian, cabal for Haskell/
>> Hackage, etc.
> 
> Note that every language-specific package manager conflicts directly
> with every operating system package manager.  Thus RubyGems, CPAN,
> Cabal, Maven, Go, etc. conflicts with the package management of Debian,
> Fedora, SUSE, FreeBSD, MacPorts, etc. leading to pain.  Pain leads to
> anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering.
> 
>> If there's not a commonly utilized one currently, perhaps we could
>> "borrow" cabal, with a trivial port.  cabal is Haskell's package manager.
>> 
>> Not only does having a standard package install system facilitate
>> adoption, it greatly facilitates code sharing and library maturation.
> 
> At the expense of easy system administration.

Not necessarily, fedora has rpm packages of gems for example. 
 
> I guess the only up side of language specific package management is that
> it enables people whose operating systems are not package structured to
> do things sensibly.  Alternatively Windows users could switch to a
> sensible operating system ;-)
> 

It's also often easier to package libraries with system specifically 
designed to do so for a particular language. That, combined with a common 
repository, usually results in a much wider selection of apis than a native 
distribution offers.