On Tuesday, 26 November 2013 at 19:06:26 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
But my understanding is that the dependency is conditional,
i.e. you have no dependency on libcurl unless you attempt to
use std.net.curl. Which strikes me as entirely reasonable. No?
There is no such thing as _The_ curl library. Different distros
may have versions with incompatible symbol versioning installed -
this is the very issue with Fedora which was actively discussed
in bugzilla.
So yes, dependency is conditional but on some distros it doesn't
work _at all_, even if libcurl is installed.
There are only 2 possible ways out of it - distributing only
source tarballs or creating distro-specific distribution archives
/ packages. Nothing else is guaranteed to work. And latter is
rarely a good idea.
