On 10/09/13 22:48, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
We've been experimenting with http://code.dlang.org for a while and things are
going well. In particular Sönke has been very active about maintaining and
improving it, which brings further confidence in the future of the project.
We're considering making dub the official package manager for D. What do you all
think?
I have no direct experience of using dub, so take this as the point of view of
someone coming to it fresh and with a "What's this all about?" mindset.
Anyway, these are the general things I feel:
* Having an official package manager (and hence package repo) is a great way
to get round the current state of confusion about D libraries, with
orphaned projects in places like dsource.org etc.
In fact I think having a well-maintained one-stop shop to find actively
maintained/developed D libraries is _more_ important than having a nice
tool to install them -- but a good tool is the icing on the cake, because
it makes it easy to just grab stuff.
* It doesn't matter that much if the tool isn't perfect right now. Obviously
if Sönke has objections that matters, but otherwise, moving forward is a
good motivation for everyone to join in and fix any flaws.
* Currently I think the documentation for dub is inadequate, at least that
which was trivial for me to find. I guess that extra stuff might be
available post-install via --help or man-pages, but that material needs
to be online to read _before_ downloading and installing. Essentially I
wasn't able to get any meaningful impression of what the tool would
actually be like to use.
* Specific things I'd like to have from a docs point of view: more detailed
descriptions of how to use dub as a consumer of packages, how to handle
both user-local and system-wide install of dub packages, a clear
description of _where_ it puts user- and system-wide installed packages
(and how to customize that), how to use packages once installed (and how
to do so with different D compilers), how to update and uninstall packages.
If anyone wants to enlighten me in this thread, I'd really appreciate it
(actually some of these questions have already been answered in other
threads), but I also think that info needs to be on the dub website. :-)
At the moment I'm a bit committed to other things but I might have a go at
turning Dgraph into a dub package just to see how it goes. Should be a nice
usability test. :-)
Best wishes,
-- Joe
