On Friday, 12 January 2018 at 16:13:39 UTC, Seb wrote:
Motivation
----------
1) It's required for Walter's work on using -betterC for the
backend conversion:
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6907
2) We start to run into random failures lately, e.g.
https://github.com/braddr/d-tester/issues/63
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/7569#issuecomment-356992048
3) There's also WIP to move dmd-cxx to 2.076.1:
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/7595
So if we have to bump the minimal dmd version required to build
DMD anyways for (1), let's be clear about it and state it.
Anyone objecting?
TLDR; I hope dmd needs a properly maintained bootstrap compiler
branch with release tags of new versions every now and then as
ldc does.
For packaging dmd on NixOS it is important to have a bootstrap
compiler because the entire package tree of the distribution is
build from scratch and no custom binaries can be used. (Well you
can patch binaries with patchelf but that's not very nice and
should probably only used for binary blobs)
Currently dmd 2.067.1 is used on NixOS as a bootstrap compiler
and the last time I tried dmd-cxx it didn't work because of some
build problems.
dmd 2.067.1 doesn't build with gcc6 which is the default for
NixOS. This is not much of a problem because it can be easily
overwritten to use gcc5 for the bootstrap compiler but still.
I also needed to patch things for the newest dmd version which I
am slowly trying to upstream but since there are no bootstrap
backports I can't get rid of those patches in the bootstrap
package.
Which frontend version such a bootstrap branch has doesn't matter
for me as long as it is maintained and I can build the newest
version of dmd and all unit tests run successfully.
