On Thursday, November 28, 2013 21:23:33 Jacob Carlborg wrote: > On 2013-11-28 20:17, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > > The zip has nothing to do with the stability of D itself. It just has to > > do > > with the stalibity of how D is distributed, which is a completely > > different > > issue. I can see why you care about the zip, given that you wrote and > > maintain a tool which relies on it, but calling D unstable because we > > might change how we release it would be like calling KDE or gnome > > unstable, because they changed from distributing their code in tar.gz > > files to tar.bz2 files. How a program or library is distributed has > > nothing to do with the stability of the code itself. > > So where do we draw the line, what's considered to be part of D, if the > releases aren't.
D is the language specification, dmd is the reference implementation of the language, druntime is its standard runtime library, and Phobos is its standard library. I don't see how the format that dmd and the standard runtime and library are distributed in is at all "part of D." It's just how it's currently distributed. You have a legitimate concern in that you have written a program which relies on how dmd is currently distributed, but I don't see how you can argue that that has anything to do with what D is. And while I don't think that we should just willy-nilly change how we distribute dmd, I would point out that we never actually promised that anything about how dmd is distributed would always stay that way. dmd has been distributed as a zip, because that happens to be how Walter decided to do it, and there's technically no guarantee that we will continue to do so. Now, the fact that a useful tool written by one of this community's well-known members and which is used by a number of folks in the community relies on the zip being put together the way that it's put together and named the way that it's name should be taken into consideration when we look at changing how dmd is distributed. But I think that you have to acknowledge that as useful as DVM is, it's relying on something that was never actually guaranteed. It just happens to be how we've done it up to now. And a number of people have been clamoring for some time that we change how do it and that the zip makes no sense, so I find it unlikely that we will continue to distribute the zip as-is. Maybe we leave it as-is temporarily, but I think that there's a good chance that at some point, you're just going to have to change how DVM works if you want it to continue to function - particularly since the zip really doesn't make sense and makes less and less sense as time goes on (e.g. the shared library situation doesn't work at all with the zip, and soon enough that will be more than just Linux). - Jonathan M Davis
