What's missing from Phobos for Orbit (package manager)

[Jacob Carlborg]

In the thread "Expanding Phobos from a flat hierarchy" there started a 
discussion about package managers. Of course I mentioned the package 
manager I'm working on, Orbit. Unfortunately people weren't very happy 
with the third party dependencies. So I compiled a list of what's 
missing from Phobos, but I never got an answer to that post in the 
thread. I have now repeated the list below of what Orbit needs that 
don't exist in Phobos. I hope I have better luck here.

Repeated message:

I've compiled a list below of things used in Orbit (directly or 
indirectly) that Phobos is lacking in. Please tell me if I'm wrong:

* DStack - Is a library for helping structuring applications. It includes:
   * Handling of command line arguments
   * Components
   * Commands
   * Starting and initializing of the application
   * Configuration
I plan to add more stuff here when needed

* Serialization - Does not exist
* ConfigMap -  Does not exist. An associative array with opDispatch 
added to it. Allows to do things like:

auto config = ConfigMap();
config.foo = "asd";
config.bar.foo.baz = "foobar";

assert(config.foo == "asd");

* XML - The XML module is slow and has a cumbersome API

* Zip - I don't exactly remember what was wrong here. It either didn't 
work or I had to reimplement a lot of functionality already available in 
Tango.

* Net - std.curl is probably a good module but it wasn't available when 
I started. I also adds another dependency.

* std.process - I have not used it myself but I've heard it's not optimal

* std.getopt - Doesn't support the following:
   * Required arguments
   * Restricting the values of a given argument
   * No way to automatically create a help/usage list out of the arguments
   * Handling positional arguments
   * No support for commands/action. That is "git commit", "commit" 
would be the command/action
   * Handle multiple command lines
   * Validation of the arguments

Various convince functions:

* any - Opposite of empty
* last - Returns the last element of an array
* map, find and any for associative arrays
* Utility functions for handling UDA's

* isBlank - Check if a value if blank. If it's a string it's blank if 
it's only contains whitespace. If it you can call .empty return that. If 
it's a value type it's not empty. If it's a reference type and it's null 
it's empty

* isPresent - The opposite of isBlank

* pluralize - Takes a string and a count. If the count is greater than 1 
it converts the word in the string to plural

CTFE:

* format - A simple formatting function
* indexOf
* contains
* hasField - Returns true if the given type has the given field
* fieldsOf - Returns all the fields of the given type
* TypeOfField - Returns the type of a field
* nameOfFieldAt - Returns the name of the field at the given position
* set/getValueOfField - Sets/gets the value of a field
* newInstance - Returns a new instance based on the class name or 
ClassInfo. Can handle any class regardless of constructors

* A couple of traits

In the end it's all about what's working.

Original message: 
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/ugmacrokqghrrwpfovam@forum.dlang.org?page=6#post-kf15td:24v63:241:40digitalmars.com

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg