Re: [Caml-list] OCaml script on windows (was Re: [ANN] React 1.0.0)

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@recoil.org>]

On 13 Apr 2014, at 10:21, Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org> wrote:

> The addition of functionalities doesn't sound like a very good idea to
> me however. With all the
> these-build-systems-suck-I-ll-just-write-my-own-build-system that I've
> seen (mostly with autotools), I don't believe this is a good idea. A
> comprehensive build system is a full project on its own and takes time
> to get ready.
> 
> An example is probably x264: some disdain for autotools and lots of
> hubris. I think that several years ago their "configure" script was
> around 200 lines; nowadays it's 1300 lines. And there's some Makefile
> and some more other stuff. And it is heavily biased towards GNU and
> Linux.
> And zlib is another example. But this one is so ridiculous it isn't even
> funny.

Daniel isn't constructing a new build system though -- he's using
ocamlbuild to take care of that.  He's simply looking for an efficient
*packaging* system to redistribute his code and take care of the metadata.

And autotools really does represent the worst of the approaches to me,
having spent years digging through hundreds of thousands of lines of
generated shell scripts to figure out why some obscure libtool option
isn't working on OpenBSD.  By generating the code and committing it,
chances are that it'll be very hard to regenerate in the future.  We've
already seen hints of this in OASIS with the minor incompatibility in
its generated code with OCaml 4.0+, which took us about 4 months of
bulk builds and cajoling upstream maintainers to get rid of the last
vestiges of.  Not really OASIS's fault (bugs happen), but the basic
architecture of "follow the autotools philosophy" causes this.

I do like the fact that I can glance at Daniel's repositories and
understand what's going on in minutes rather than days...

-anil