The D ecosystem in Debian with free-as-in-freedom DMD

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, 2017-04-11 at 11:55 +0000, Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> 
[…]
> That's the problem I would like to see addressed (but given 
> Walter's comment, it won't be feasible to resolve it in the near 
> future).
> We could simply do away with "don't use distro packages for your 
> D programming", at least that's what Go recommends.

The Go community advice against platform packages is principally
because they want up-to-date packages on old distributions.

Most programming languages are going this route, used programming
language tools and libraries are decreasingly packaged by the OS. Given
things like Anaconda and PyPI, all the Fedora and Debian Python
packaging is increasingly wasted – except for those packages used by
the distribution itself. So I can see Fedora and Debian packaging
Python and some bits and pieces, but otherwise it's not needed. Same is
true for Ruby, Go, Groovy, Java, etc. 

Debian and Fedora really do need to reassess their packaging strategy
with respect to software development. Far too much effort is going into
packaging when rolling release is far better handled by language
specific systems. Go is going this route, Python likewise.

I suggest getting the compilers onto the distributions as a marketing
thing not as a real use thing. For me the way Rust works by having it's
own shell-based installer is the right way of installing languages.
SDKMAN! is an even more extensive system for all JVM-related systems.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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