I think I've come so far in my development of a package manager that
it's time to think how it should interact with the compiler.
Currently I see two use cases:
1. When the package manager installs (and builds) a package
2. When a user (developer) builds a project and want's to use installed
packages
In the best of worlds the user wouldn't have to do anything and it just
works. The package manger needs to somehow pass import paths to the
compiler and libraries to link with.
I'm not entirely sure what the best method to do this would be. But I'm
thinking that if the compiler could accept compiler flags passed via
environment variables use case 1 would be easy to implement.
For use case 2 it would be a bit more problematic. In this use case the
user would need to somehow tell the package manager that I want to use
these packages, something like:
// project.obspec
orb "foo"
orb "bar"
$ orb use project.obspec
or for single packages
$ orb use foobar
$ dmd project.d
If environment variables are used in this case, then the package manager
would need a shell script wrapper, the same way as DVM does it, to be
able to set environment variables for the parent (the shell). The reason
for this is that a child process (the package manager) can't set
environment variables for the parent process (the shell). This
complicates the implementation and installation of the package manager
and requires different implementations for Posix and Windows.
Another idea would be to manipulate the dmd.conf/sc.ini file but that
seems to be quite complicated and messy. On the other hand, this
wouldn't require any changes to the compiler.
Any other ideas?
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit/wiki/Orbit-Package-Manager-for-D
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit
--
/Jacob Carlborg
