Have Win DMD use gmake instead of a separate DMMake makefile?

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 08:30:26 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/12/2013 11:48 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> On 2013-08-13 02:42, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>>> Is is possible from a licensing standpoint to just distribute 
>>> a copy of
>>> gmake built by gnuwin?
>>
>> I don't see why we couldn't do that. It's a completely 
>> separate tool and
>> shouldn't "infect" anything else. We might need to accompany 
>> it with a license
>> file and a link to the source code to be on the safe side.
>>
>
> Again, read my reply to Brad in this thread.

Presumably you are referring to this quote, which does not show 
up as a reply?

"Oh, I forgot to mention, licensing.

We want Phobos to be free of any restrictive licensing. GPL is 
restrictive, and
so is LGPL.

We very deliberately picked Boost. Having Phobos be a mix of GPL 
and Boost would
utterly defeat picking Boost."

If you're only talking about distributing a GPL-licensed gmake 
binary with dmd/phobos, I don't think it has any impact on Phobos 
licensing, ie the GPL would only apply to the gmake binary.  The 
GPL is a very badly written license, but I think it has been 
generally established that you can distribute tools like gmake or 
g++ with your own code and that doesn't make your own code have 
to be GPL, as long as gmake/g++ are only used to process/compile 
your code and your own code doesn't integrate the source for 
gmake/g++, ie gdc, which is almost never the case.

Personally, I like the D-based build system idea.  Distribute 
dmd/phobos with a D-based build tool like dub, which has been 
compiled ahead of time for each supported platform and will 
compile D for you, if you want.  Of course, this means that 
you'll still need to maintain makefiles on the D build machines 
that will build dub for the D maintainers to distribute, but it 
isolates all the complexity of makefiles from end users, so they 
don't have to touch any of that stuff.  Whether that ease of use 
is worth the extra effort, I don't know.