Homebrew formula: build from sources, betas, git head

[Orvid King]

On Thursday, 28 November 2013 at 02:54:27 UTC, Luís Marques wrote:
> (context: homebrew is a very nice package installer for OS X. 
> It is, IMO, the easiest way to install dmd and related 
> utilities in OS X, and should probably be mentioned/recommended 
> in the downloads page)
>
> Is anyone here proficient with homebrew formulas? The current 
> formula for DMD is only able to install the binaries (which is 
> not very usual for homebrew, AFAIK). Being able to install from 
> sources (--build-from-source) would be nice, not just to 
> support --devel (e.g., the beta versions, which could also be 
> supplied as binaries) but also --HEAD, which would build the 
> git master branch.
>
> Adding support for those options is important, because they 
> allow one to:
>
> - easily install and uninstall the beta versions, and quickly 
> change between several versions (they are cached). These betas 
> tend to not see as much field testing as one/Walter would like 
> before they become a non-beta release, so this would help. 
> Adding a tag like "latest-beta" to the git repo would allow one 
> to build from sources the latest beta, even if the homebrew 
> formula was out of date (e.g., it did not specify the latest 
> beta binaries, or a specific beta version tag, like 
> v2.064beta4).
>
> - easily install the git head version. Homebrew makes this much 
> easier than following the instruction at 
> http://wiki.dlang.org/Building_DMD#Posix, by cloning the repo 
> automatically, building the binaries/libs (which would be fat 
> binaries, unlike the wiki instructions), installing, creating 
> dmd.conf, etc. Support for this option would make evaluating 
> dmd/phobos/druntime bugs much easier ("does it still reproduce 
> in git head?"). You can also access the cloned repo and do your 
> changes from there, so it lowers the barrier to casual 
> contributions even more.
>
> So, is anyone here proficient with homebrew formulas? Anyone 
> willing to take this task? If no one volunteers, I'll try to do 
> it when I find the time, but I'm not very proficient with 
> homebrew formulas/Ruby, and homebrew's documentation has always 
> been lacking, IMO. So, if someone is comfortable with homebrew 
> your help would be very welcome.

Well, I was actually thinking about creating them at some point,
because currently I just have a small bash script that updates my
local repos, builds and installs using the posix makefile, then
makes a couple of changes to the default dmd.conf, due to the
fact I'm using the posix makefile, and using homebrew to do that
would be a lot easier for most.