Proposal: DPM, the D Package Manager

[Marco Nembrini]

On 03.01.2013 09:33, David Nadlinger wrote:

> Sorry for being a bit blunt, but: What advantages would this provide
> over just using the package management facilities of one's favorite
> distro? Keep in mind: http://xkcd.com/927/ ;)
>

If you want to distribute your software or library to multiple distros 
or OSes, you would only need to learn how to work with a future dpm 
instead of learning the packaging system of all your different supported 
distributions. And the competing standards should not be a problem if 
the community decides to endorse on particular way of doing things 
(provided it's compatible with other approaches).

> The biggest problem one faces when trying to package D libraries right
> now is that the different D compilers (DMD, GDC, LDC), but also multiple
> versions of the _same_ compiler, are not binary compatible to each
> other. So, if you don't want to use a build tool like rdmd to build
> *everything* from scratch each time, you need to manage multiple
> binaries around for any given library, one for each compiler version.
>
> As it is actually quite common to have multiple D compiler versions
> installed side-by-side – e.g. DMD for fast iteration and GDC/LDC for
> release builds, or transitioning one's projects one by one to a new DMD
> version after the release – I think that any design which doesn't
> address this issue isn't worth the effort over just using an existing
> solution.
>

Doesn't this mean a D package manager is needed to deal with this problem?


-- 

Marco Nembrini