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

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 14:04:44 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> [...]
> /usr/share/source/D/package-name-version
>
> Add a search path like that to Dub and create source only 
> library packages and that is pretty much all the distribution 
> we need for libraries I reckon.

It's more likely that the path would be `/usr/include/d` because 
that's the place the D sources seem to usually reside, especially 
if they are also used as "headers" for shared libraries.

At time I am playing around with the idea of using pkg-config[1] 
files to enlist the sources a D library consists of.
By doing that, we would have a very build-system agnostic way of 
doing storing that information that can be used by Automake 
(native), Dub, Meson and even plain Makefiles. It's also very 
widely used (although it is commonly not used to list sources).

This would also jive really well with the existing D packages in 
Debian and we could - if we go down the source-only route - still 
decide to precompile a few selected libraries, for example in 
case they are very time consuming to compile or really large.

This will *not* solve the issues with Phobos breakage though, as 
Phobos is a shared library. But doing that would pretty much work 
around all other problems, except for the cost of having 
statically linked binaries, but that seems to be inevitable 
anyway given the state of things.

(Disclaimer: This is not a D team policy draft yet, just an 
opinion at the moment that might be refined or changed entirely)

[1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/