On Thursday, 26 November 2015 at 16:10:10 UTC, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
[...]
The only valid reason for an IDE to directly parse the package
description is basically if it wants to provide a custom UI for
editing it. If the IDE is written in D, it can easily use DUB
as a library and not only get the package description in a
common format, but also nicely statically typed. If not, the
conversion feature that was planned for the next version would
trivially solve that, too.
No, there's also a problem of latency caused by dependency
checking (and if there are any). But that's actually linked: if
an IDE wants to make a UI editor for a DUB description it's
faster to parse directly the description...Maybe you'll remember
a brief discussion about this (at the end of summer when you
released latest DUB version, maybe in the NG discussion created
for the RC).
But that's a only personnal concern. Since SDL is not popular,
there is no SDL library for the language used to write the IDE,
so it sucks a bit...The day it'll become unsustainable I'll write
a SDL parser for this lang, but so far it only happend **once**
to find an online package that was in SDL and that I ve ignored
because I knew I couln't easily inspect the sources, modify them
or recompile.
