On Friday, 13 January 2017 at 11:50:25 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:

> LDC which is packaged by both Debian and Fedora is the
> only practically usable D compiler on both these platforms.

What's impractical about downloading and installing an rpm?  For that matter, downloading the source and compiling it isn't all that impractical either.

On Sat, 2017-01-14 at 17:28 +0000, Elronnd via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 13 January 2017 at 11:50:25 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> 
> > LDC which is packaged by both Debian and Fedora is the
> > only practically usable D compiler on both these platforms.
> 
> What's impractical about downloading and installing an rpm?  For that matter, downloading the source and compiling it isn't all that impractical either.

Downloading and installing an RPM outside of dnf.

For you.

There is little point in debating this on these lines. Your perspective is of a determined technical person really wanting to get moving with something. That's great, but is a totally different perspective from trying to gain traction and have good marketing amongst people who have no intention of putting themselves out. From a marketing perspective if it isn't in the aptitude (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint,…) or dnf (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL,…) install area it doesn't exist – at least in terms of easy traction.

The upshot of this thread is that downloads from the website should be downgraded in profile for Linux and MacOS – Windows is just a #### system where download is all there is (caveat Chocolatey but it has very little traction). For MacOS (or whatever it is called this week), there is MacPorts and Brew and everything D related should be in there. For Debian, Fedora, Arch, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. all D related things should either be in the main repository for the system or (second rate but…) in a repository that can be added to the set up. As soon as the way of installing is "download and install" you are lost. This is not about the keen folk, this is about the average folk.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Saturday, 14 January 2017 at 18:41:21 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sat, 2017-01-14 at 17:28 +0000, Elronnd via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Friday, 13 January 2017 at 11:50:25 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> 
>> > LDC which is packaged by both Debian and Fedora is the
>> > only practically usable D compiler on both these platforms.
>> 
>> What's impractical about downloading and installing an rpm?  For that matter, downloading the source and compiling it isn't all that impractical either.
>
> Downloading and installing an RPM outside of dnf.
>

What do you mean "outside"?
I use DMD on CentOS, and I installed it by command:

yum install http://downloads.dlang.org/releases/2.x/2.072.2/dmd-2.072.2-0.fedora.x86_64.rpm

From your point of view it is "outside" or "inside" of yum?

On Saturday, 14 January 2017 at 23:24:18 UTC, Jack Applegame wrote:
> On Saturday, 14 January 2017 at 18:41:21 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> On Sat, 2017-01-14 at 17:28 +0000, Elronnd via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> On Friday, 13 January 2017 at 11:50:25 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>>> 
>>> > LDC which is packaged by both Debian and Fedora is the
>>> > only practically usable D compiler on both these platforms.
>>> 
>>> What's impractical about downloading and installing an rpm?  For that matter, downloading the source and compiling it isn't all that impractical either.
>>
>> Downloading and installing an RPM outside of dnf.
>>
>
> What do you mean "outside"?
> I use DMD on CentOS, and I installed it by command:
>
> yum install http://downloads.dlang.org/releases/2.x/2.072.2/dmd-2.072.2-0.fedora.x86_64.rpm
>
> From your point of view it is "outside" or "inside" of yum?

Still outside because it is not developed as part of Fedora.
One big reason for getting a language's toolchain into the main repositories of a distribution that Russel didn't mention yet is the additional QA and testing it will get.
For example, the PIE/PIC issue would not have happened at all if people were using the tools provided by the distribution, because we made sure that every tool we ship works with this change.
Using pieces that are part of the distribution is also way easier than getting them from external sources, also mainly because we can give a lot of guarantees about software we ship in a distribution.

And also, D software that is itself part of the distro will be compiled with one of the purely-free compilers anyway, so if you target one of those it just makes sense to primarily use LDC or GDC to ensure the software works well.

On Wednesday, 11 January 2017 at 00:33:41 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
>> But it is not clear if anyone cares at this stage.
>
> are rather frustrating to read.

Alright, sentence like this come from extreme frustration at things being almost constantly broken. For instance:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17107

As it turns out, this problem is not quite fixed.