On Wednesday, 11 March 2015 at 06:45:17 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
I want to make sure vibe releases are in sync and guaranteed to
work with dmd, thus making for a perfectly smooth experience.
How will bundling Vibe with D achieve that goal?
What will ACTUALLY change by bundling Vibe with D?
What happens if a regression occurs in Vibe just before a D
release? Do we block the release for the sake of Vibe? What if
there's no one around to fix it? We have enough problems with
blocking bugs in Dub/Vibe-related components in the dlang.org
repo already.
What happens if we discover a regression in Vibe after a D
release? Do we make a point release just for the sake of Vibe?
What if Vibe needs to iterate faster than DMD's release cycle?
My question about Vibe API versioning still stands, what if
people want to use an older Vibe with a newer DMD?
Precedent shows that Vibe and related components simply do not
have a bus factor high enough to not be a liability if included
with D.
I am trying to work with you here. We just have different values
on what is actually important, or there is something more to this
plan that I don't see, something more than just including Vibe in
dmd.zip.
We do not have a strong precedent for this. The closest thing we
have are things like Dustmite, which are so specialized that they
don't matter in this case, and Visual D, which I'm not really
sure greatly benefited from the exposure - we've covered one IDE
among many, and despite moving the project under
github.com/D-P-L, Rainer remains the sole maintainer. And you
know the story with DDox.
What is indubitably, actually, very important, and something I'm
surprised you haven't pushed for since long ago, is making it
EASY to get more things. Dub absolutely must be a part of D, and
not today but one or more years ago. There is now a rift in this
community, between people who use code.dlang.org and its
packages, and those who do not. This is not close to the
Tango/Phobos split, but we cannot afford anything like this again.
Coming from a language with a package manager, and then trying to
build a project with a dozen dependencies by manually cloning the
repositories and making sure they are the correct version, is
madness. A package manager encourages people to build many small
reusable components, because the overhead of managing each
component becomes very small, and this is something we really
want.
From this perspective, Vibe itself is not that special. It is one
big piece of the puzzle, but its value is greatly diminished in
isolation.
You don't need to bring in Vibe in D itself, you need to bring in
the entire ecosystem.
