[Don Dailey]

I thought I would give dsss a try.

Not to be too critical, but the first problem I encountered (among many others) is that there is no install instructions. This from a piece of software that is suppossed to make software installation easy! Duh!!!

I'm running ubuntu feisty fawn in 32 bit on my core 2 duo. When I downloaded dsss 0.72.1, there were no install instructions on the main web page so I expeted them to be in the tar ball. Instead, just a few directories at the top level.

After about 45 minutes of digging around on the web I got frustrated and just un-tarred it and added the bin directory to my PATH. That seemed to do the job but I have no idea if it's a proper install.

Of course my next problems might be related to this - no way to really know for sure.

I next tried net installing gdc itself, which crashed on phobos but seems to have picked up the gdc binary. But before I even got to this point dsss failed due to not being able to find curl. It was easy enough to apt-get install this which seems to have cured that problem.

I then tried tango - which failed.

I tried wxD because I plan a GUI project using D and wxWidgets, but of course this did not install either. This is what I now expect to happen in the general case when using dsss.

I tried reinstalling gdc, perhaps superstitiously hoping it would somehow fully install but I got the same error.

Surprisingly, tango installed the second time. I wondered if the first install picked up something that was needed to make the second succeed - something broken about dependency checking order or something ???

Don't know whether to pursue this any farther or just start downloading and installing these things manually - and using Makefiles for my project.

Am I simply running into some common problems that are easily resolved or is just a case of dsss still being at a primitive stage?

In order that this isn't just a critical post I will make a constructive suggestion. It's all about documentation. How many software projects have almost no documentation? Even D, as wonderful as it is, suffers in a horrible way due to this. If the documentation for D was superb and complete and polished, D would rise quickly to the top 2 or 3 languages used.

My suggestion is clean everything up, document it, make sure it works and don't worry about anything else until you have this polished up looking thing that everyone wants to use.

- Don

[doob]

I completely agree with you that there could be more documentation.
Some projects are well documented, some not so well documented.

From the dsss main site there's a link to some video tutorials:
http://www.codu.org/dsss_tutorials/

[Don Dailey]

[ncoda]

Yeah I've had VERY similar problems. D is a very hard language to set up a development environment! If there was like a single installer that set everything up, D would be adopted by many more programmers.

[torhu]

If you guys use irc, you can join #D at freenode to get instant help. Lots of linux users there.

And there's no need to use makefiles. Use the rebuild tool that comes with dsss. Just make sure you update rebuild/dsss when you update the compiler, since rebuild chokes on D syntax it doesn't recognize.

And please don't try to use wxD for anything serious yet, it's not ready. Basically, D has no usable cross-platform GUI libs yet.

[fraserofthenight]

[quote]Use the rebuild tool that comes with dsss. [/quote]

Agreed. DSSS seems like a great tool, but I've just run into so many issues with it that Rebuild + Perl script is the way for me. Rebuild saves tons of time (no more worries about dependencies).