Re: [Caml-list] Proselytizing

[Xavier Leroy <xavier.leroy@inria.fr>]

> I am trying, as hard as possible in my non-copious free time,
> to get past my own inflection point, and one sticking point is
> confusion with CamlTk.  I thought it worked -- it's clearly
> "here" enough to run the browser, and I did the load and execute
> game in the scripting window, but when I try the examples, it
> fails to find it:

I agree the situation is a bit confusing: there are two OCaml GUI
libraries based on Tk.  One (Labltk) is part of the standard
distribution, and used by the interface browser.  The other (Camltk)
is distributed separately and used in the demo that didn't compile.

> I'm sure this is some sort of pilot error on my part, but it's 
> not getting me to where I want to be.  I tried to modify the makefile
> to use labltk instead of camltk, but it failed there with

Sorry for the scary error message, but it just says that Camltk and
Labltk have different interfaces!

> I also tried to install camltk separately, but that was an
> almighty mess (among other things, the configuration uses
> obsolete macros to check for the existence of Cygwin, never
> mind total confusion about what tools to use to make libraries,
> and what suffixes different sorts of file should have.)
> I am doing all this on Windows 2k, with some recent version
> of Cygwin

Camltk is (for the time being) Unix-only.  Although Cygwin does heroic
efforts to emulate Unix, it's not quite Unix and I'm not surprised
that Camltk doesn't compile right out of the box under Cygwin.

This mess should be cleaned up in the future, as there is an effort in
progress to merge Labltk and Camltk, and install both in the standard
distribution.  In the meantime, I agree a Labltk version of the
examples is in order.

> Remember -- I am getting stumped by one of the demos that
> is supposed to get people started, and I am normally capable
> of installing garbage like Oracle, Apache, mail server
> software, and firewalls, all with my bare hands.

I don't doubt that, but my experience (as a long-time Unix user who
installed quite a bit of garbage of the kind you mention) is that
installing Unix software on Windows machines, even with Cygwin, is
often surprisingly hard.

- Xavier Leroy
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