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

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, April 11, 2017 12:25:09 Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Haskell and OCaml permanently rebuild the whole stack on every
> new compiler release, which is why they have permanent transition
> trackers[1], so they basically continuously rebuild. I want to
> avoid this at all cost for D, as this is very very maintenance
> intensive and painful, and will require much more people to work
> on it than D has available in Debian.

That's basically what's required with D. It is not ABI compatible across
releases, and while ABI compatibility might be nice, it really isn't
reasonable with D - especially with how attributes work and how template
heavy D code is. If the D compiler gets upgraded, then anything that gets
built needs everything that it depends on to have been built with that exact
compiler version.

But if we just use dub - which _is_ the official packaging and build tool -
then we avoid these issues. Ideally, the compiler and dub would be part of
the distro, but libraries don't need to be. And it sounds like that's
basically how the Go and Rust folks want to function as well. So, it would
make sense for these languages to simply not have their libraries be
included in distros. The build tools are plenty.

- Jonathan M Davis