On 2010-08-05 01:21, Michel Fortin wrote:
On 2010-08-04 15:31:32 -0400, Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com>
said:
Michel Fortin wrote:
As a side note, my D plugin for Xcode expects DMD to be available at
/usr/local/bin/{dmd,dmd1,dmd2} and the runtime libraries should be in
/usr/local/lib. It won't work if the files can't be found there,
although I might change that if an official distribution of DMD
installs itself elsewhere.
To me, the biggest problem is deciding where the files should go.
There doesn't seem to be any consensus or culture in OS X about this.
I agree. It took me quite a while to decide to do things as I did. The
goals were:
1. It should be easy to manually replace DMD from a new package from
Digital Mars.
2. It should work on the command line with no user intervention (no need
to add something to $PATH in the bash profile for instance).
3. It should not mess with the system directories.
Except when it come from third party package managers (fink, MacPorts),
most Unix software not coming from Apple installs in /usr/local on Mac
OS X (for instance I have: MySQL, Git, Mercurial, Doxygen, 7za and a
couple others there). So it makes a lot of sense to install it there.
To make manual replacement easy, I wanted to preserve the dmd and dmd2
directories from the zip archive intact, so it's easy to swap them for
another one. Initially, I decided to use /usr/local/dmd and
/usr/local/dmd2, and add with symlinks in /usr/local/{bin,lib,man} to
make everything work from the command line without changing $PATH.
Symlinks didn't work quite well: dmd takes the value of args[0] to know
which directory to search for dmd.conf. I guess I could have installed a
dmd.conf in /etc/ to override that, but then how do you install dmd1 and
dmd2 side by side? So what I did is replace the symlinks with a sort of
trampoline program that adjusts the value of the args[0] for the path of
the DMD just before calling exec(), allowing a different dmd.conf to be
used for each one.
And using /usr/local/{dmd,dmd2} wasn't entirely satisfactory either. Mac
OS X hides the /usr folder when you browse using the Finder. So
replacing /usr/local/{dmd,dmd2} manually with a newer one isn't as
straightforward as it should be. I settled on using
/Library/Compilers/{dmd,dmd2}. This isn't entirely satisfactory either
since it doesn't follow UNIX ways, but it's not too far of how Mac OS X
is packaged and I told myself it'd be easier to support users that way.
Now, the only missing piece for an easy manual replacement of DMD is a
zip archive where the executable bit is set.
I would vote for something like this, making it easy to have dmd and dm2
installed side by side and to easily manually update the compiler to a
newer version. I would name the trampoline programs dmd1 and dmd2 and
then make a symlink named dmd pointing to dmd1 or dmd2.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
