On Saturday, 11 November 2023 at 23:28:18 UTC, Trevor wrote:
On Saturday, 11 November 2023 at 07:12:21 UTC, Christian
Köstlin wrote:
On Saturday, 11 November 2023 at 01:50:54 UTC, Trevor wrote:
I'm just getting in to D , coming from a C and Python
background. I've had a play with DUB and adding packages to
my project, but it seems like there should be a way to
install packages so they can be used in any D program I
compile without creating a whole package. For example in
Python you can just go "pip install abc" and then any script
can use abc.
How does one install packages globally, and how can I write
programs that use the third-party packages without being
wrapped in a dub file?
There is no way to install a dependency for all your d
programs globally.
In general you also should be careful about which dependencies
you pull in and control them tightly.
In general the approach taken by dub is slightly different.
The dependencies you are using in all your programs are put to
`$HOME/.dub/packages/...` and are in theory available for all
your programs, but you still have to tell dub, that you want
to use one of them. This is similar to python in that, pip
puts your dependencies somewhere in your `$PYTHONHOME` or
`$PYTHONPATH` (I am not 100% sure about that).
You can tell dub (and dub then tells the compiler where to
find the dependencies) in two way:
- Create a complete dub project with dub.json/sdl and add the
dependency there (e.g. with `dub add` or while creating the
project or by adding them in your editor to the dub.json/sdl)
- Create a self executing d file (that is run when you just
call it like a script and compiled on the fly). See
https://dub.pm/advanced_usage#single-file for details.
Another way dub is able to "install" something is by using
`dub fetch` to pull a package with a binary in it (e.g. `dub
fetch dfmt`). You then can run this executable by `dub run`
(e.g. `dub run dfmt -- ... here go the arguments to the dfmt
tool).
Kind regards,
Christian
Thanks for the detailed reply. I guess what I'd like to do is
not create a DUB package for every little project I work on. It
seems like most modern languages require a package/dependency
manager though. Being able to install libraries globally would
avoid this but I can how that can cause it's own set of issues.
It doesn't seem efficient in terms of bandwidth and hard disk
space to have a new copy of a library for each project that
uses it?
Did you try https://dub.pm/advanced_usage#single-file for your
usecase.
This one installs the dependencies once in `$HOME/.dub` and
compiles them on the fly.
- For small projects this is I think quite nice.
- For medium projects I like how dub works at the moment with a
`dub.sdl/json` in the projects folder and the shared cache of
dependencies in `$HOME/.dub`.
- For really big problems I would like to have a way to install
the dependencies really locally to the project (just to have more
control over them, e.g. like ruby's `bundle package` command
works).
Kind regards,
Christian
