On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 at 06:54:51 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 06:44:03AM +0100, Jesse Phillips wrote:
[...]
I don't think I understand having to build dmd just because
you have
a different distribution, Phobos maybe but dmd... Even for
Phobos
I'm skeptical but am not going to install a different distro to
experiment myself.
If you have used enough Linux distros (or even different
versions of the
same distro!), you will realize that all it takes is for a
single shared
library on the system to be a different version, missing, or
just the
same version built with different compiler flags, and the
executable
will not work.
Yes, the most common being libc. Usually coming from compiling
against a newer version and trying to use it with an older
version (but not all projects are as disciplined as libc).
Not to mention that filesystem layout can be different
across distros (and versions of the same distro), which will
break
things.
It can, but that isn't relevant to the discussion of linking we
have here.
Basically, to guarantee a program runs on distro X, the only
way is it
has to be built from source. If you're lucky, somebody else has
already
done that, and you can just download the binary. (Or better yet,
somebody packaged it for your distro, then you can just install
it via
your system's package system.) But if not, you'll just have to
do it
yourself.
All you've said is that we are distributing DMD wrong and should
be building it on every platform, I still don't know what
building DMD has to do with libcurl though (DMD doesn't use it).
This I agree with. However, it misses the point. The point is
that the
core D toolchain (dmd/phobos/druntime) would have one less
dependency,
which is generally a good thing, because you want to make it as
easy as
possible for people to get a working compiler up and running.
I didn't miss this point, I started with explaining that I've
never thought about curl before (other than wondering if I had a
problem which I needed to solve with it).
Though, it seems libcurl is installed due to other dependencies.
So I'm less likely to see this issue.
I guess I should mention I don't use the Windows installer, just
extract the zip. So doubt libcurl is on any of the Windows
machines I use.
