On May 24, 2012 6:43 AM, "Tobias Pankrath" <tobias@pankrath.net> wrote:
>
> On Thursday, 24 May 2012 at 09:50:33 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 2012-05-24 at 10:34 +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> [...]
>>>
>>> Every time I need to do something in an language without official package manager support, I curse myself.
>>
>>
>> On the other hand Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, MacOSX, etc. already have
>> package managements systems. A problem is that Windows does not.
>>
>> Experience shows (Maven, Gems, Hackage, ...) that having language
>> specific packaging and platform specific packaging causes strife.
>
>
>
> Platform specific package management is not enough for development use. It only works, if you need the version the platform provides. And everyone must have the same platform to have the same version.
>

Yes and no, for actually using programs that use the language the system package manager is far superior because when you install an app it can also install the required packages in one go. (As opposed to having to go to the d package manager and get the right libs.  However you bring up the point of development.  If you look at the arch build system it has what you want.  You can write descriptions on how to download and build a package and then is it just as easy to install as a dget would be, however thee advantage is that you can still depend on these packages.  Also, for switching versions all you have to do is change on variable.  I'm sure there are things like this for other systems but I use arch and I see a solution to your problem.