Snap packages for D compilers and core projects

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 30 January 2017 at 14:40:13 UTC, qznc wrote:
> No comments? Well, there seems to be no downside (apart from 
> the work).

Yea, I'm a little sad to see the apparent lack of 
feedback/interest :-\  I had quite a lot of fun creating these 
packages and was hoping for a bit more curiosity.

> So far, I considered Snap an Ubuntu-only initiative of 
> yet-another-package-format. If it really gains cross-distro 
> support, this is a great way for better D support on Fedora, 
> Arch, etc. What is the evidence for cross-distro support? Can 
> it be measured somehow?

Snap packaging started as something Ubuntu were developing for 
their use-case, but started gaining cross-distro interest last 
year (probably because AFAICT its feature-set and simplicity of 
use is quite a bit ahead of alternatives like Flatpak).

Installation instructions for various distros:
http://snapcraft.io/docs/core/install

> Is it legally possible to distribute DMD this way? Afaik only 
> dlang.org is allowed to distribute it publically due to the 
> backend licence issue.

Yes, that's a very good point that I wanted to raise.  There is a 
legal agreement that you're asked to make with respect to usage 
and distribution of packages.  It looks like it ought to be 
compatible with constraints on DMD (re)distribution, but it would 
obviously need to be reviewed and agreed to by Walter.  This is 
one reason why if I do take this forward, I'd like to do so with 
some sort of official backing.

It doesn't stop me moving forward with DUB, of course, but it'd 
be nice to do that officially as well.