obsolete D libraries/modules

[Ramon]

On Thursday, 29 August 2013 at 19:18:48 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> I wonder if we should post a notice on dlang.org to the effect 
> that
> dsource.org is dead, and that people shouldn't rely on it. 
> Right now,
> having no way to actually update that site to add a notice to 
> this
> effect, the first thing people are going to do when they 
> discover D is
> to hit the search engines and dsource.org is inevitably going 
> to turn
> up. Then it's anyone's guess whether the net effect will be 
> positive or
> negative -- I'm guessing negative, a bad first impression of D 
> that it
> has lots of promising but dead projects.

Yes. I, being a D newbie myself, can report that's exactly what 
happened. And it's particularly bad because, while a newb-newbie 
might happily hack along and learn D, a professional newbie has 
actual work to do. *of course* looking for what's available is 
one of the first things to do. This whole thing get's even more 
weight as D happend to be advertised like "use any C library to 
your liking".


> [...]
>> But there is a (possibly very small) but, too: Tango.
>> 
>> Maybe I'm simply mistaken but my impression so far is: There 
>> once
>> were 2 rt libraries, phobos and tango and (for whatever 
>> reason, no
>> judgement implied) phobos won and today with D2 it's D + 
>> phobos,
>> period.
> [...]
>
> This is a dark part of D's history that people don't really 
> like to talk
> ...

Oh, I did b no means intend to dig in wounds. My point rather is: 
2 "batteries included" libs is not a good thing but a bad thing 
because it confuses newbies.

I go with phobos because it's the official thingy and because I 
don't see any major obstacles or bad issues.

Being as was, hase come to be and is, some cleaning might be 
desirable. Frankly, the only reason I didn't just click away 
Dstep is because it's *so* bloody important. Otherwise seeing 
"tango" somewhere makes me click away.
OTOH binding C libraries being so bloody vital for D I feel we 
should a) "port" Dstep to phobos and b) advertise prominently, 
happily and loudly.

Being able to import C libs to D quite simply is vital, it's a go 
or break issue for many. And if Dstep is the reasonable and 
working way to get that done, we should put it on the front page.

---

As for the modules, dsource etc., I very strongly feel that we 
should go the way of Python, span and others, i.e. we should 
build an official repository.

A+ -R