dlang.org/posix.mak dependencies

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 02:14:06 Borden wrote:
> Good evening, all,
> 
> I'm making a new thread on this because my question isn't
> strictly related to the DDoc issues I've mentioned in earlier
> threads. Rather, it has to do with the dependencies of the
> posix.mak file in the dlang.org repo (on GitHub, for greater
> clarity):
> 
> posix.mak, beginning at line 236, compiles local copies of DMD,
> DRuntime and Phobos. Is all of this extra compilation really
> necessary for someone who, presumably, already installed D using
> the installer packages?
> 
> Wouldn't it be more reasonable to see if the most current version
> of DMD is installed and, if not, panic out and tell the user to
> go and fetch the latest copy from the website? Then the rest of
> the makefile could use the installed copies on the user's
> computer rather than download and recompile them?
> 
> This question is specific to the dlang.org repo and NOT to any
> other repos hosted at GitHub.

It's a bad idea to assume that a released version of dmd and Phobos will work 
with the current git repos. It's far less of an issue than it used to be, but 
breaking changes still happen (some of which are regressions and get fixed and 
some of which are on purpose), and there's no guarantee that there haven't 
been changes which require that you have the latest of everything in order to 
build the git versions.

- Jonathan M Davis