On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 02:42:13 UTC, frustrated wrote:
> Two days later and I still cant get a 'Hello World' to compile.
> It is far beyond me how a project can exist for so many years
> and still not have a straightforward installation that works out
> of the box. Yes.. read the forums and search google for solutions
> that may or may not work depending on the phases of the moon,
> I have to ask you:
> Why bother ?
> Why would anybody trust a compiler written by people
> who regard making it run out of the box an after-thought ?

Could you, please, post a step-by-step description of what operations are you doing and the errors that you receive?

I know it is cumbersome, but it would be needed only once. Then, you'll receive some more accurate help.

On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 02:42:13 UTC, frustrated wrote:
> Two days later and I still cant get a 'Hello World' to compile.

Hmm, sorry for whatever went wrong. It would be nice if you let us know what went wrong.

> It is far beyond me how a project can exist for so many years
> and still not have a straightforward installation that works out
> of the box.

Well we do care about this, one more reason to resolve your problem.

On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 02:44:48 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> I always just use the zip which works fine out of the box without even needing to be installed.

We're missing an installation guide on a prominent place on the front page.
Such things really scare away a lot of people.

On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 10:42:48 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> We're missing an installation guide on a prominent place on the front page.
> Such things really scare away a lot of people.

All gcc, clang, ldc etc are installed in the same way: download zip, unpack, use. Not sure if it's documented anywhere (looks intuitive), it's just everything traditionally worked this way for ages.

On Fri, 24 Oct 2014 10:42:47 +0000
Martin Nowak via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 02:44:48 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > I always just use the zip which works fine out of the box without even needing to be installed.
> 
> We're missing an installation guide on a prominent place on the
> front page.
> Such things really scare away a lot of people.
if we scaring away people who can't download and run one .exe, this can't be bad thing. there is clear link do download insteller on dlang.org. when i was in need to write simple program on win8 box, i downloaded that .exe, started it, pressed some "next" and "finish" buttons and... voila, dmd compiler is here and working. if this is way too hard for someone, then i doubt that he should write programs at all.

On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 13:04:48 UTC, ketmar via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Oct 2014 10:42:47 +0000
> Martin Nowak via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 02:44:48 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> > I always just use the zip which works fine out of the box without even needing to be installed.
>> 
>> We're missing an installation guide on a prominent place on the front page.
>> Such things really scare away a lot of people.
> if we scaring away people who can't download and run one .exe, this
> can't be bad thing. there is clear link do download insteller on
> dlang.org. when i was in need to write simple program on win8 box, i
> downloaded that .exe, started it, pressed some "next" and "finish"
> buttons and... voila, dmd compiler is here and working. if this is way
> too hard for someone, then i doubt that he should write programs at all.

There are other more subtle problems that someone can run into. One problem I've encountered on Windows is that having a '+' in your path trips up Optlink (Notepad++ triggered this issue for me). Linking starts failing for no apparent reason, and it is extremely frustrating until you figure out what's wrong (and still maddening afterword to think that such a stupid bug exists). Let's try to help debug the problem rather than making presumptions about OPs technical knowledge.

On Fri, 24 Oct 2014 13:26:15 +0000
Meta via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:

> Let's try to help debug the problem rather than making presumptions about OPs technical knowledge.
that's only if OP wants his problem to be solved. here it's clear that he doesn't want to solve the problem, as he gives no details at all (not even OS, let alone describing what he did and what he got). there is nothing to help with. it's not about tone of OP posting, it's about having nothing to start with. should we torture him to get that gory details?

The only OS that I found problematic with the dmd zip is CentOS 5.8, all other systems I've tried: Centos 6.x, Ubuntu, Windows, MacOS, they all work perfectly.


On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 02:42:13 UTC, frustrated wrote:
> Two days later and I still cant get a 'Hello World' to compile.
> It is far beyond me how a project can exist for so many years
> and still not have a straightforward installation that works out
> of the box. Yes.. read the forums and search google for solutions
> that may or may not work depending on the phases of the moon,
> I have to ask you:
> Why bother ?
> Why would anybody trust a compiler written by people
> who regard making it run out of the box an after-thought ?

Yes on a sufficiently old version of Linux you will have to recompile DMD. I doubt this is the user's problem though, as people in this situation are generally pretty used to encountering this.

On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 02:42:13 UTC, frustrated wrote:
> Two days later and I still cant get a 'Hello World' to compile.
> It is far beyond me how a project can exist for so many years
> and still not have a straightforward installation that works out
> of the box. Yes.. read the forums and search google for solutions
> that may or may not work depending on the phases of the moon,
> I have to ask you:
> Why bother ?
> Why would anybody trust a compiler written by people
> who regard making it run out of the box an after-thought ?


It does run out of the box. May be you were in a bad mood.
Please try the D.learn group.