Pathing in the D ecosystem is generally broken (at least on windows)

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 26 September 2015 at 15:17, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On 9/25/2015 9:07 PM, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>
>> I did file each one yesterday as I encountered these problems.
>
>
> Ah, wonderful!
>
>> My post
>> was about something slightly different though, I just want to try and
>> bring it to attention again that the little things matter more than
>> the attention they tend to get.
>> I think it's important to realise that the ecosystem is taken in
>> aggregate. DMD can do a great job of this stuff, but if LDC doesn't
>> have the same love, it's 'D' in general that gets the blame.
>
>
> I understand.
>
>> Out of curiosity, what is the strategy wrt LDC and GDC moving forward?
>> Will they move towards simultaneous releases? Will they be included in
>> CI builds, such that PR's which break (or don't work) the other
>> compilers do fail CI?
>> GDC as a culture has different packaging expectations so I don't think
>> it's affected so much, but especially for Windows users LDC is the way
>> forward, and it should be as solid as DMD in terms of presentation.
>
>
> I'll leave that to the GDC and LDC teams.

And right there is the problem as I see it, summarised in one sentence ;)

If you take the D ecosystem as aggregate, these issues are just as
much issues for the core dev team as they are for these couple of guys
with a distinctly unfair burden.

An example that comes to mind; I think one of the biggest technical
problem in the D ecosystem right now is that LDC doesn't support CV8
debuginfo writing. You might be one of the world's most qualified
experts on that, would you consider adapting that work to LLVM?

Are GDC/LDC actively building against DMD head these days? I might be
out of date, but that wasn't the case in the past.
Last time I was current, they were updating periodically, and at great
effort to adapt all the changes in the meantime that didn't consider
their builds. Do we know what kind of time the GDC/LDC guys spend
fixing up breakages like that? Would it be better to catch those
breakages when the initial PR is accepted, rather than a wall of
issues every now and then? If I had to guess, I'd say it looked like
this is probably the reason for infrequent frontend updates, and the
other compilers always being a couple of versions behind DMD, which is
very toxic for the ecosystem. I might be completely wrong on that, but
it looks that way.