[Pkg-d-devel] Process for adding dinotify and unit-threaded

[Matthias Klumpp]

2017-11-23 9:58 GMT+01:00 Russel Winder <russel at winder.org.uk>:
> The majority of D programmers will likely use Dub and get dependencies
> from the Dub repository. However the gtkd-3 package shows that Debian
> and Fedora are building a "packaged from source for the platform"
> collection.
>
> I wonder if expanding this would be a Big Win™ for D development on
> Debian and Fedora. In particular for myself I have built dinotify and
> unit-threaded not as a package but as a locally installed static
> library and shared object with pkg-config file. For this I added a
> Meson build which has been accepted into the source tree so is present
> upstream.
>
> Sadly Meson does not yet support unity builds for D, so Meson cannot be
> used to build the tests for a D code using unit-threaded. SCons does
> however have such support.
>
> So I am using Meson to build D libraries and SCons to build the
> applications.
>
> I guess the question is: is there benefit in adding dinotify and unit-
> threaded to the packaged D stuff alongside gtkd?

Absolutely! It just needs someone to do the packaging work and to
maintain the packages (that is, update to newer versions and fix
bugs).
Usually I add libraries in case there is an application in Debian as
well that needs them, e.g, things like GtkD and mustache-d are in
Debian because Tilix or appstream-generator need them.
For the future, I need to add at least dpq2 and fluent-assrts because
I am using those in software I want in Debian and because at least
fluent-asserts is used a lot in the D community (and we would really
like to run all tests).

tl;dr: We need package maintainers for D stuff! If you are interested
in doing the packaging work, I could review & sponsor packages, and we
could also give access to the Debian D Team Git repository (although I
need to research how that works now with Debian switching to Gitlab
for packaging).
The benefit of having more D code in Debian is that D becomes a lot
more visible in the community, and D compilers get much better
supported in general in the distribution (and it apparently also means
we find tons of bugs in LDC and LLVM, at the moment
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879040 is still
unresolved).

Cheers,
    Matthias

-- 
I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/