"Andrew Wiley" <wiley.andre...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:mailman.776.1307728872.14074.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 9:29 AM, Caligo <iteronve...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu >> <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote: >> > That's it. We need a package management expert on board to either >> > revive >> > dsss or another similar project, or define a new package manager >> altogether. >> > No "yeah I have some code somewhere feel free to copy from it"; we need >> > professional execution. Then we need to make that tool part of the >> standard >> > distribution such that library discovery, installation, and management >> > is >> as >> > easy as running a command. >> > >> > I'm putting this up for grabs. It's an important project of high >> > impact. >> > Wondering what you could do to help D? Take this to completion. >> > >> > >> > Andrei >> > >> >> Andrei, I have to respectfully disagree with you on that, sorry. >> >> D is supposed to be a system programming language, not some scripting >> language like Ruby. Besides, the idea of some kind of package >> management for a programming language is one of the worst ideas ever, >> specially when it's a system programming language. You have no idea >> how much pain and suffering it's going to cause the OS developers and >> package maintainers. I can see how the idea might be attractive to >> non-*nix users, but most other *nix OSs have some kind of package >> management system and searching for, installing, and managing software >> is as easy as running a command. >> > > It doesn't have to be hard if you build the package manager in such a way > that it can be integrated into the OS package manager, whether that means > letting the OS package manager modify the language package manager's > database or just adding a switch that turns your package manager into a > dumb > build tool so dependency checks can be left to the OS package manager. > That's my theory, anyway. >
I'd say one critical requirement for a package manager is that it be based around the idea of supporting multiple versins of the same lib at the same time. If you're just going to re-invent your own little DLL hell you'd almost be better off just going with the OS package manager.