Phobos and older DMD versions

[Brad Anderson]

On Tuesday, 6 August 2013 at 14:51:35 UTC, qznc wrote:
> My recent pull request [0] triggered some issue, which should 
> get a bigger discussion:
>
> Should Phobos version N also compile with DMD N-1?
>
> In my opinion it should, because it makes Phobos development 
> simpler. You don't need a self compiled dmd to fix bugs.
>
> However, reality sometimes requires exceptions. I understand 
> that sometimes Phobos uses a feature of dmd HEAD. That is why I 
> said "should", but not "must". ;)
>
>
> [0] 
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/1454/files#r5601514

The contribution guide should probably say it must build with DMD 
master because that's really the only requirement and the only 
thing the autotester checks against.  It seems unlikely that the 
code in a pull request will ever make it into a DMD N-1 release 
so while it would be nice if it built with the current DMD stable 
release it's not really vital that it does.

Until fairly recently I'd just use the latest dmd release when 
making phobos pull requests because building dmd always seemed to 
give me trouble.  There are new guides and tools to help with 
this though.

On Windows you might add a blurb about using the new 
bootstrap-dmd.bat[1] file Nick Sabalausky created.  The wiki also 
has a guide that might be worth linking to that shows that helps 
you setup the peculiar (in my opinion) directory structure needed 
to build dmd, druntime, and phobos from git master[2].

You might also want to incorporate stuff from from the Pull 
Requests page on the wiki or link to it.[3]

1. 
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/installer/blob/master/bootstrap/bootstrap-dmd.bat
2. http://wiki.dlang.org/Building_DMD
3. http://wiki.dlang.org/Pull_Requests