DUB - call to arms

[Russel Winder]

On Fri, 2019-04-19 at 14:58 -0700, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
[…]
> Yes. I for one dumped Gradle shortly after starting my Android project,
> because it just didn't let me do what I need to do, or at least not
> easily.  Gradle expects your typical Java codebase with standard source
> tree structure.  I needed D codegen and cross-compilation as integral
> parts of my build.  The two ... let's just say, don't work very well
> together.  It's the "my way or the highway" philosophy all over again.
> Yes it hides away a lot of complexity, and does a lot of nice things
> automatically -- when what you need to do happens to match the narrow
> use case Gradle was designed to do.  But when you need to do something
> *other* than the One Accepted Way, you're in for a long uphill battle --
> assuming it's even possible in the first place.  To that, I say, No
> Thank You, I have other tools that fit better with how I work.
> 

Gradle is definitely not rigid as implied in the above: it can work with any
source structure. True there is a default, and "convention over configuration"
is the main philosophy, but this can be easily overiden by those who need to. 

There are hooks for doing pre-compilation code generation, though I suspect
whilst there is support for C++, there is no ready made support for D.

That you chose to ditch Gradle and go another way is entirely fine, but to
denigrate Gradle as above based on what appears to be a single episode quickly
abandoned, is a bit unfair to Gradle.

> 
[…]

The elided comments on Gradle requiring JVM and thus lots of memory and
relatively slow startup is very fair. Much better grounds for your ditching of
Gradle than not finding the Gradle way of doing things you needed to do.

I feel Gradle is probably not a good choice for D builds now, but it could be.
This is because no-one is using for that purpose and so the easy to use, D
oriented tools are not available, everything has to be done with the base
Gradle tools. 

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20190426/cac8ab17/attachment.sig>