On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 04:34:23 UTC, Jason White wrote:
Why is having dependencies so damaging for build systems? Does it really matter with a package manager like Dub? If there is another thread that answers these questions, please point me to it.
Rephrasing one famous advice, "every added tooling dependency in an open-source project reduces amount of potential contributors by half" :) Basically, one can expect that anyone working with D will have dmd/phobos and, hopefully, dub. No matter how cool Button is, if it actually needs to be installed in contributor system to build a project, it is very unlikely to be widely used.
That issue can be reduced by making Button itself trivially built from plain dmd/phobos/dub install and configuring the project to bootstrap it if not already present - but that only works if you don't also need to install bunch of additional tools like sqlite or make.
From that perspective, the best build system you could possibly have would look like this:
``` #!/usr/bin/rdmd import std.build; // define your build script as D code ```
