Practical Problems with distribution D projects

[John Colvin]

On Tuesday, 25 February 2014 at 15:06:14 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Tuesday, 25 February 2014 at 14:51:48 UTC, Assaf Gordon 
> wrote:
>> My target audience is not D developers - it is unix casual 
>> users (not even developers).
>> I want to make it the easiest for them to use my program.
>> If it's requires more than the standard "configure && make && 
>> make install" (or the cmake equivalent), then many of them 
>> will not do it.
>
> Then push it into distro repositories. You are NOT helping by 
> recommending them to do "make install", quite the contrary, 
> harming whole ecosystem. Casual users should not be even aware 
> that "make install" exists. Being one of package maintainers 
> myself I really hate this kind of "helping" attitude, it causes 
> only trouble.

Personally I have to compile all my software by hand at work, 
because I don't have root/sudo access.
Although I agree that in general one should try to work within 
the package managers as much as possible, many (most?) 
distributions don't have even half decent capabilities for 
source-based distribution within the package manager, especially 
when working without root.